The plot of Touch unfolds in a near future that might actually arrive next week—the perfect backdrop for Courtney Maum’s protagonist, a trend forecaster whose livelihood depends on predicting exactly what consumers will want to buy next. Maum will discuss the novel at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on June 9 at 6 p.m.
In Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, essayist David Sedaris welcomes longtime fans even further into the story of his life. Sedaris will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 9 at 6:30 p.m.
Roots Music in America and Lucky Joe’s Namesake, two new volumes from the University of Tennessee Press, collect the late folklorist Joe Wilson’s idiosyncratic writings on music, history, and life.
Best known for his debut novel, Big Fish, Daniel Wallace is a master of wit and whimsy, gleaning both wonder and absurdity from the commonplace. In Extraordinary Adventures, Wallace delivers a modern variation on the picaresque, replete with madcap hijinks. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 7 at 6:30 p.m.
A cast of visionaries and eccentrics populates The Potlikker Papers, from Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Freedom Farm and Pig Bank, to Edna Lewis, who could tell when a cake was done by listening to it.
In Behind the Moon, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers on a complex, hallucinatory tour of human and animal consciousness in the course of a story about a mother’s search for her lost daughter.
