In Nashville Native Orchids, Soraya Cates Parr has written a fascinating first book that is part natural science, part field guide, and part cultural heritage. Native orchids turn out to be a key to unlocking hidden nature throughout the city. Soraya Cates Parr will discuss the book at Warner Park Nature Center in Nashville on February 22.
In his first book, Valley so Low, Jared Sullivan, a journalist who has written for The New Yorker, Time, and The Bitter Southerner, tells the story of a decade-long legal battle for Tennessee workers sickened and killed by the coal sludge from the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant disaster. Sullivan will appear at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin on October 15; Williamson County Public Library in Franklin on October 16; East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on October 17; ArtsBuild in Chattanooga on October 23; and the 2024 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 26-27.
Ace Atkins, known for his Quinn Colson novels, has crafted a classic detective tale in Don’t Let the Devil Ride, an international thriller solidly anchored in Memphis. Atkins will appear at Novel in Memphis on June 26 and in an online discussion with Chapter 16’s Michael Ray Taylor on July 16.
Gregory Mcdonald’s 1974 novel Fletch created the modern comic mystery, influencing a generation of writers who followed. In addition to nine Fletch books, Mcdonald created such series characters as Flynn, Skylar, and Son of Fletch, writing many of those from his home near Pulaski, Tennessee.
Stan Isaacs stood at the forefront of a group of offbeat sports journalists in the early 1960s, at the start of an influential career that spanned half a century. A decade after Isaacs’s death, Memphis historian Aram Goudsouzian has masterfully edited Out of Left Field: A Sportswriter’s Last Word, a collection that works as both memoir and a showcase of great sportswriting. Goudsouzian will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on April 29.
John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, by historian Raymond Arsenault, captures the storied life of Rep. John Lewis from his childhood in Alabama through the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Bloody Sunday, and his long political career.
