Susannah Felts

May 28, 2010 So hoary is the tradition of novels about writers that it’s impossible to attend a graduate writing program without being warned against the shopworn trope of writing about being a writer. Nonetheless, with said programs popping up on seemingly every campus, a new breed of books about writers—specifically, MFA candidates and graduates—has emerged. Husband and Wife, the new novel from Leah Stewart (a Vanderbilt graduate and former visiting professor at both Vanderbilt and Sewanee), takes up the task with keen insight and subtle wit. But it also has, significantly, a broader sweep in its intelligent portrayal of modern motherhood and the challenge of creative productivity in a two-breadwinner world.

April 19, 2010 Southern writers don’t let their men off easily. Think of Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, and George Singleton, to name just a few: their protagonists are a thick crowd of failed or ridiculously flawed, if infuriatingly likeable, Southern men—men who are more often than not their own worst enemies, men who pilot pickups across modern Southern landscapes that look and feel nothing like the generous front porches and magnolia-scented breezes of Southern Lit as we once knew it. Enter Jack Lang, a modern Southern man whose life crisis is held up, often comically, for observation in This Is Just Exactly Like You, the debut novel from North Carolina writer Drew Perry, who will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on April 21 at 7 p.m.