Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Steve Haruch

What We’ll Miss and What We’ll Share

The meaning of the Southern Festival of Books in a season of loss

We often conceive of loss only as a falling away, but it is also a binding. Think of the groups whose only purpose is to bring together people who have lost the same thing.

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1998

Book Excerpt: Greetings from New Nashville

Greetings from New Nashville, an essay collection edited by Steve Haruch, will be published in October 2020. Contributors include Ann Patchett, Ben Folds, and Tiana Clark. Haruch is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the Nashville Scene, The New York Times, NPR’s Code Switch, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is currently producing a documentary film about the history of college radio.

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Rugged Country

Min Jin Lee discusses identity, diaspora, and resistance in her novel Pachinko

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, follows a Korean family through four generations of migration, hardship, and survival, telling their interlocking stories in vivid detail. 

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Blood on the Tracks

Colson Whitehead constructs an alternate route out of American slavery in The Underground Railroad

In Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, fugitive slaves are spirited away to freedom by an actual network of trains.  The Underground Railroad is the 2018 Memphis Reads selection. Whitehead will discuss the novel at Christian Brothers University on September 5 and at Rhodes College on September 6. Both events are free and open to the public.

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Always an Unexpected Grace Note

Excerpt: People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley

On March 28, 2016, Jim Ridley collapsed in his office at the Nashville Scene. His heart had failed. For days after his death, you could search the national trending topics on Twitter and find the name Jim Ridley there alongside the likes of Star Wars and Bruce Springsteen. In June 2018, Vanderbilt University Press will bring out a collection of Ridley’s film reviews edited by Steve Haruch.

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Some of Them Burn

Planned community and contested motherhood collide in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere

Set against the backdrop of a planned community, Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, explores motherhood, teenage angst, cultural representation, and the life of the artist. Along with Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy, Ng will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on September 28 at 6:30 p.m.

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