Book Reviews

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A Lyle Saxon Reader

Written by Lyle Saxon and edited by James Michael Warner Second-place winner of the 2019 IndieReader Discovery Award for Fiction! Lyle Chambers Saxon earned his writing chops while reporting for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. As a young man in the early 1920s, Saxon pursued an exhausting newspaper career, writing the stories and character sketches that gave him the skills to produce his later classics of Louisiana literature, such as Fabulous New Orleans, Children of Strangers and Lafitte the Pirate. First...

Book Review: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Review originally published July 8, 2018. Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 book, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner) is an engrossing novel of a Mississippi family struggling with issues of race, unemployment and threatened family breakup. It is a difficult book to put down. Set on the Gulf Coast and in the Mississippi Delta, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a story of thirteen-year-old Jojo, his grandfather Pop, grandmother Mam, mother Leonie and toddler sister Kayla. Jojo has a close relationship with Pop, whose years of...