Book Reviews

Book Review: Jaws of Life (Laura Leigh Morris)

Laura Leigh Morris. Jaws of Life. Morgantown, W.Va.: Vandalia Press, 2018. 168 pages. Softcover. $18.99. Laura Leigh Morris’s debut collection of short stories, Jaws of Life, focuses on characters from a small town in West Virginia. Morris, who has had her fiction published in The Louisville Review, Weave Magazine, and other journals, gathers together some gems from…

Book Review: One Man’s Dark (Manning)

Maurice Manning. One Man’s Dark. Port Townsend, Wa.: Copper Canyon Press, 2016. 110 pages. Hardcover. $23.00. On the cover of One Man’s Dark, Maurice Manning’s superb new collection of poems, appears a sepia photograph of the interior of an empty tobacco barn, sunlight visible on and through the spaced boards…

Night Garden (Mullins)

Carrie Mullins. Night Garden. Lexington, Ky.: Old Cove Press, 2016. 241 pages. Softcover. $16.00. The aptly titled Night Garden by Carrie Mullins is a virtual seedbed of characters— characters whose virtues are hidden in the shadows of their circumstances, fertilized by an apathetic economy, isolated by geographic region, and choked…

Utopia Drive (Reece)

Erik Reece. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 368 pages. Hardcover. $28.00. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea by Erik Reece provides an opportunity to step away from current fractious political discourse and explore…

Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Smith)

Lee Smith. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life. Chapel Hill, N.C..: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016. 202 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life is a collection of fifteen essays, published over the span of twenty years. “This little book,” as Lee Smith called it in a recent reading in Abingdon,…

The Rope Swing (Corcoran)

Jonathan Corcoran. The Rope Swing: Stories. Morgantown, W. Va.: Vandalia Press, 2016. 144 pages. Softcover. $16.99. To the Outsider reader—the person who isn’t quite sure how to pronounce “Appalachia” and perhaps can’t locate its reaches on a map—the characters in Jonathan Corcoran’s short story collection The Rope Swing will stand…
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