50 Books/ HT50, Part One: 1973-1978
As Humanities Tennessee celebrates its 50th birthday this year, we’re marking the occasion by highlighting 50 notable Tennessee books that have appeared over the past five decades.
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Julia Franks’ The Say So recalls a time when unwed mothers were hidden
Julia Franks’ second novel, The Say So, serves as a cautionary tale exploring the starkly different choices unwed mothers in the 1950s faced compared to those in the post-Roe 1980s. Her cross-generational narrative was inspired in part by her own unplanned pregnancy. Franks will appear at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on June 14.
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A woman reckons with the past in Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones
Polly Stewart’s crime novel The Good Ones centers a young woman’s disappearance within an intricate web of mysteries and the expectations that define womanhood in the South. Stewart will discuss The Good Ones at Novel in Memphis on June 13.
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Chef Vishwesh Bhatt expands the Southern culinary repertoire
With I Am From Here, chef Vishwesh Bhatt breaks new ground in the “Southern cookbook” genre. Bhatt will appear at a ticketed event held at Restaurant Iris in Memphis on June 16.
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Rachel Louise Martin chronicles the battle to desegregate an East Tennessee high school
Rachel Louise Martin’s A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation recounts the story of the “Clinton 12,” who in 1956 were the first students to desegregate an all-white school in the South. Martin will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 14 and Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 20.
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Once upon a time, Donna Parker and Trixie Belden saved a lonely little girl
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: For a child in small-town Alabama, books provided solace in summers without friends and activities.
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