3 Review(s)

The 2017 issue of the North Carolina Literary Review features North Carolina literature and the other arts. It opens with an essay on the opera adaptation of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. In another essay, Randall Wilhelm examines the literature and art pairings in the NCLR. The creative writing includes poetry by Betty Adcock, James Applewhite, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, and the winner and finalists of the 2016 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition; fiction by Michael Parker and Anita Collins, winner of the 2016 Doris Betts Fiction Prize; and creative nonfiction by Trace Ramsey, winner of the 2016 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize. In interviews, Clyde Edgerton, Michael Gotting, and Garth Risk Hallberg talk about the role of music and art in their writing. In the ""Flashbacks"" section, the reader will find an essay about the numerous book clubs of Greenville and their incredible service to that area; Lee Bridgers's fanciful reminiscence of meeting Betty Smith; and two appreciations of Betty Adcock from the 2016 North Carolina Writers Conference, at which she was the honoree. The ""North Carolina Miscellany"" section concludes the issue with an interview with the new novelist Matthew Griffin, discussing his debut novel Hide, a love story about two men who meet just after World War II, fall in love, and move out into a remote North Carolina countryside in order to live the rest of their lives together.