A Burgeoning 'City of Art'
The Crescent City shows its artsy side through sculpture, a citywide installation and activist project through the winter.
Literary Friday, Edition 125
Our interview with Carl Hiaasen, 'The Silent Sister' readalong part two, 50 of the scariest short stories, the Texas Book Festival this weekend and new fiction in Southern Voice. Happy Literary Friday!
Thou Shalt Not Kill
Sprawled in six inches of warm tub water, Clarissa studied her belly as it rose and fell above the water line. Seeing it with a critical eye, it reminded her of a dolphin, shiny white and shaped like a torpedo
10 Best Bites From Birmingham
I was honored to attend the Birmingham Public Library's Eat Drink Read Write Festival at the beginning of October. A tasty celebration combining Southern literature with Southern food, EDRW gave me the chance to spend a week in The Magic City and discover its booming culinary scene. Most folks are probably familiar with signature restaurants The Highlands Bar And Grill and Hot and Hot Fish Club, but Birmingham has lower-key spots serving internationally inspired cuisine, favorite food trucks, coffeehouses, plenty of vegetarian options and establishments with desserts that are hard to forget. At the end of the festival, a new book celebrating the city's food scene, Birmingham's Best Bites, was unveiled. In celebration, I decided to compile my own list of best bites from Birmingham (listed in the order I ate them). 1. Deviled Egg BLT with fried pickled okra from Saw's Street Kitchen Sunday in Avondale Park gathered several of the city's food trucks, including Saw's Street Kitchen. Among options for barbecue and a Sweet Tea Fried Chicken Sandwich, I couldn't pass up the Deviled Egg BLT. Between two slices of toasted white bread came a sandwich stuffed with deviled egg filling, lettuce, tomato and bacon. A side of pickled fried okra and
The Best Restaurant Row in the South
Discover Houston's culinary mile, complete with Mexican steakhouses, creperies, pizzerias and beer bars.
Savor the South in Greensboro
Southern cookbooks inspire heartfelt taste memories among chefs, home cooks and new friends.
An Interview With Michael Pitre
The Louisiana native uses his experience in the Marines to create a fictional story following the lives of a Road Repair Platoon in Iraq as they come to terms with both life at war and life at home. by Rien Fertel War stories often expose the complicated relationship that exists between soldiers and their terrain, the physical spaces they inhabit: the trench-dug dirt and boot-sucking mud, the battles for inches of land, the earth they die fighting for and which eventually swallows us all, whether we’re soldiers or not. In Iraq, “Every inch of that place, every grain of sand, wanted desperately to kill us,” Michael Pitre writes in his outstanding new novel Fives and Twenty-Fives (one of Deep South's fall reads). Born in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, Pitre joined the Marine Corps in 2002, served as a communications and logistics officer over two deployments in Iraq, and attained the rank of captain before resettling in New Orleans. Pitre’s title refers to the lengths of the tactical safety zones that Marine convoys employ when investigating possible roadside bombs. Keeping by the fives and twenty-fives measurements (five meter radius from a potential explosive devise when in vehicle, twenty-five on foot) remains essential for the members of the Road
Literary Friday, Edition 124
Start of 'The Silent Sister' readalong, tracking the Zodiac killer in Louisiana, why John Grisham is sorry, news on Jackson's Welty Biennial & a chilling short story about a missing girl. Happy Literary Friday!