An interview with the New Orleans-based novelist Nathaniel Rich.

Casey Clabough (born 1974) is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, and five scholarly books on Southern and Appalachian writers. William Wright interviews the author about his personal history and writing life.

Dan Baum brings a critical, refreshing thoughtfulness, a sharp-edged flexibility, and a sense of humor to the national debate on gun control.

Miller Williams, the Arkansas poet, is in fantastic but scant company. Arkansas is better known for its blues, country, and jazz artists. But almost anyone who reads Williams’s poems will realize that they can also be sung. Are song lyrics really poems set to music? Williams’s poems are poems, and the music comes through with reading, aloud or in one's head.

Compared to Larry Brown, Cormac McCarthy, and Quentin Tarantino—for both the violence in his stories and the simple truths that echo from his prose—Bill writes sentences that are abrupt and vicious. In Donnybrook, his first novel, it's the shortest sentences that hit the hardest.