Soldania (on Paul Ruffin’s The Time the Waters Rose & Stories of the Gulf Coast; Sonja Livingston’s Ladies Night at the Dreamland; Gilbert Allen’s The Final Days of Great American Shopping: Stories Past, Present, and Future; John Lane’s Coyote Settles the South; & Becoming Southern Writers: Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner, edited by Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince Jr.)

Samuel Pickering, the author of more thirty books, which span several genres, was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught English for forty-five years, thirty-five of them at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is Parade’s End, published by Mercer University Press in 2018. “Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in the Smithsonian decades ago, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.”