James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a powerful tale of early 20th-century Jewish and African American communities bonding together to protect a disabled orphan. McBride will deliver the Nashville Public Library Foundation Literary Award lecture at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Nashville on November 9.
In Tell Me Everything, Strout unites her most famous and beloved characters — Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob Burgess — in a haunting but nevertheless optimistic examination of the way we depend on stories to survive. Strout will appear at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on September 12.
Four years ago, the literary world unexpectedly lost a beloved and widely acclaimed writer, Brad Watson. This year, W.W. Norton revives a legend with This Is Happiness, a posthumous collection including previously unpublished work that reinforces the strength of Watson’s gifts and the generosity of his spirit. Watson’s editor, Alane Salierno Mason, will discuss There Is Happiness at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
Mesha Maren’s Shae is both a powerful queer coming-of-age novel and a meditation on the challenges of teen parenthood and the horrors of addiction. Maren will discuss Shae at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 30.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: A National Book Award Finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, The Yellow Birds by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers has been hailed by a host of literary luminaries as an instant classic. Written in lyrical prose that veers between terse understatement and vivid figurative language, The Yellow Birds is a rich literary experience as well as a harrowing narrative about the effects of war on both soldiers and families.
Ben Fountain’s Devil Makes Three is a pulse-quickening adventure and espionage thriller set against the political turmoil of early 1990s Haiti. Fountain will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.
