At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.
Starting from an actual 1967 forum featuring South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Martin Luther King Jr., activist Stokely Carmichael, and beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Gerald Duff’s Nashville Burning looks at three consecutive Aprils of violence and change at Vanderbilt and other parts of the Music City.
The Unquiet Grave, Sharyn McCrumb’s latest historical novel, is based on a true story, chronicling the notorious trial of a horse-stealing blacksmith accused of strangling his third wife to death in 1897.
With virtuosic lyricism and the striking juxtaposition of religious and erotic obsession, Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon delivers an unforgettable and astonishingly original portrait of the moral and psychological consequences of unfaithfulness. Quatro will discuss Fire Sermon at Arts Build in Chattanooga on January 11 and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 6.
Songwriter and composer Steve Dorff’s new memoir, I Wrote That One, Too… A Life in Songwriting from Willie to Whitney, tells stories of creativity, encounters with stars, and lessons from a colorful life.
In her memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, Sewanee alumna Kelly Grey Carlisle delivers an often bleak story with skillful tenderness. In the process she explores the power and limitations of love.
