Madison Smartt Bell and his fiction tend to evade easy categories. As a writer who started publishing in the early 1980s, he was never affiliated with either the Minimalists or the "Brat Pack" novelists such as Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz. Grounded...

Effusive critical acclaim can be as debilitating as it is gratifying for young writers. Madison Smartt Bell, named by critics very early in his career as one of the best writers of his generation, has been singularly unaffected by the enthusiastic...

MADISON SMARTT BELL IS A WRITER of gritty urban realism and pitch-perfect evocations of historical Haiti. He's also the director of the creative writing center at Baltimore's Goucher College. He has even dabbled in film, recently adapting his novel Doctor Sleep for the...

PRINCE EDWARD By Dennis McFarland. Henry Holt. 354 pp. $25 Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic of Southern literature that many would like to emulate. Donna Tartt captured something of Lee's achievement in The Little Friend, but by an approach...

In the following interview, which originally took place in August, 1992, Weaks questioned Bell about the southernness of his fiction, the influence of the Fugitives/Agrarians on his work, and the future of southern literature.

In the review below, Vernon appraises All Souls' Rising, concluding that there "are flaws, but flaws dwarfed by a powerful and intelligent novel."

In the mixed review below, McGrath ponders the themes of abuse and vulnerability in Barking Man, suggesting that "the events that befall Bell's misfits and outcasts lack significant power in either existential or literary terms."