Book Reviews

Through 13 linked stories, Leaf Seligman’s From the Midway creates a world apart: the tragic, broken-down world of a second-rate traveling carnival in early 20th-century America. It is a beautifully written and deeply affecting meditation on the barriers that separate us from one another and from our own deepest longings.

In All the Ways We Said Goodbye, Team W — the partnership nickname of bestselling authors Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White — embarks on a third novel. This time, the connecting strand running through the engrossing stories of three formidable women living in three different time periods is a place: the Ritz hotel in Paris. The authors will appear at Novel in Memphis on January 23.

Lorraine M. López’s sharply funny collection of linked short stories, Postcards from the Gerund State, focuses on a group of women faculty navigating life and work at a small conservative women’s college.

Tennessee native and former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright is sometimes described as worldly, even cosmic, in his subject matter, and yet his poems are often grounded in everyday reality and memories of his home state. Oblivion Banjo brings together the poet’s own selection of work from a career spanning nearly half a century.

Prathia Hall was a minister, activist, and academic who played a critical but largely unknown role in the civil rights movement. Memphis church historian Courtney Pace recounts her pivotal influence in Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall.

When Spenser goes west in search of a missing young actress in Ace Atkins’ Robert B. Parker’s Angel Eyes, the Boston PI roams the dark streets of Raymond Chandler and noir gumshoes, finding clues amid echoes of his own past.