Blake Smith

North Florida may not seem a promising site for a literary scene — for one thing, it’s awful humid — but forty years ago the Gainesville area was home to a set of trailblazing gay writers who drew on the traditions of southern literature in innovative and sometimes shocking works. At its center was … Continue Reading

“You have to read this book to understand the South,” my freshman-year history teacher told me. In my adolescent mind, she was herself the South — a chubby cheerful busy spinster whose family had run a small town upstate a generation before and whose memory extended into countless other families’ … Continue Reading