A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Rewriting the Footnotes

By Liz Garrigan

Last year, we were entertaining a visiting Nashville couple at a gorgeous, candlelit jazz bar in downtown Bangkok, where we have lived for eight years, when the man — a powerful, intelligent, and well-respected friend of ours — leaned across the table, clicked his gin and tonic against my husband’s glass and said, “Curt, you’ve given your family such a wonderful life.” This man is progressive, thoughtful, funny, someone I admire deeply. But his words landed like a gut punch.

Ink-Stained Elegy

By Liz Garrigan

In Come Again No More, David Wesley Williams resurrects the spirit of a dying newsroom with the lyrical gusto of a man both mourning and celebrating his first love. This is a novel about, among other things, the end of an era — the collapse of American newspapers, yes, but also the twilight of a man who is skeptical, rumpled, and in love with ink. David Wesley Williams will discuss Come Again No More at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on November 13.

A Revolving Door of Death

By Liz Garrigan

Between 2018 and 2020, Tennessee state officials killed seven men by electrocution or lethal injection, more than any other state in the country except Texas. In Death Row Welcomes You, journalist Steven Hale tells the stories of the condemned and the people who have come to know and love them. He also exposes the arbitrary nature of the death penalty and the hypocrisy of Tennessee governors. Hale will appear at the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.

Memphis Mourning

By Liz Garrigan

In her website bio, Memphis novelist Sara Koffi describes herself as a writer who likes to “humanize Black women by giving them space on the page” and “explore the nuances of ‘unlikeable female characters.’” She does both in her widely anticipated debut While We Were Burning, a thriller whose plot hinges on the killing of a Black teen. Sara Koffi will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on April 16.

Choice Poor

By Liz Garrigan

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.

Wounded Eagle

By Liz Garrigan

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America offers a persuasive case that we should all become “poverty abolitionists” who refuse to live as “unwitting enemies of the poor.” Desmond will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20.

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