Sam Pickering

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.”

Southerners, Snakes, and Me

[an excerpt] Men and women are not only themselves, Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor’s Edge (1944), “they are also the region in which they were born, the city […]

Footprints (on John Gimlette’s Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka; Rob Schmitz’s Street of Eternal Happiness; Robert Moor’s On Trails; Richard Tillinghast’s Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places; and Malachy Tallack’s The Un-Discovered Islands)

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.)

At the Beginning and the End of the Earth (on Basin and Range by John McPhee; Sand Rivers by Peter Matthiessen, Hugo van Lawick)

on Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, David A. Jasen; Brewster’s Millions by George Barr McCutcheon, David A. Jasen; & The Eighteen-Carat Kid and Other Stories by P. G. Wodehouse, David A. Jasen