Editor's Note

The cover for Gone Before Goodbye, Reese Witherspoon’s collaboration with award-winning mystery author Harlan Coben, was revealed last week, and that got us thinking about some of the other intriguing books due for release this fall. Silas House, writing as S.D. House, has penned his own mystery novel with Dead Man Blues, which, like Gone Before Goodbye, is due in October. September will bring Nashville author Eliana Ramage’s debut To the Moon and Back, a novel about a young Cherokee woman’s burning ambition to be an astronaut. Alan Lightman’s The Shape of Wonder, co-written with Martin Rees, is forthcoming in September as well. Cheryl McKissack Daniel’s The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers, due in August, tells the story of a remarkable Tennessee family. August will also see a new novel by Susan Gregg Gilmore, The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush. 

That’s just a sampling of what’s in store later this year, Meanwhile, we’ve got reviews of two new books this week. Hamilton Cain looks at historian David Narrett’s The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840. “Narrett achieves the goal he set (and then some),” Hamilton writes, “filling an important niche in our understanding of a vast and contradictory history.” Writing about Richard Bausch’s latest story collection, The Fate of Others, reviewer Ed Tarkington notes that Bausch’s “gift is to show us ourselves as we are, as we were, and as we hope to be.” Rounding out the offerings this week is a new essay by Rolli. His “Missing Cat” is a wry, bittersweet take on the trials and joys of ailurophilia. 

News Roundup

• Michael Ray Taylor wrote about a remarkable cave discovery for Smithsonian Magazine.

• Kory Wells has a new essay in Salvation South.

• Silas House talked with Colm Tóibín for the PBS series Great Conversations.

• Bradley Sides talked about writing weird fiction with EnglishMatters. 

• Poems by Jane Snyder appeared in the latest issue of Acta Victoriana.

• Whitney Bryant was shortlisted for The Masters Review Winter Short Story Award.