Book Reviews | Chapter 16

Jane from Cincinnati

With Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers a contemporary adaptation of Pride & Prejudice

By Ed Tarkington | August 3, 2016

The Austen Project has commissioned six contemporary authors to write modern adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. Tasked with the daunting challenge of reimagining the beloved Pride & Prejudice, bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has delivered Eligible, an inventive and irreverent update to a revered tale. Sittenfeld will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16, 2016. All festival events are free and open to the public.

Where The Stories Live

In Laura Hendrix Ezell’s A Record of Our Debts, small-town lives are bound by their mysterious history

By Emily Choate | August 2, 2016

In A Record of Our Debts, a debut story collection by Cookeville writer Laura Hendrix Ezell, paranoia runs tightly through a collection of small towns where the bonds of community may chafe, but freedom can become its own prison. Ezell will discuss A Record of Our Debts at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16, 2016.

A Noble Lunacy

Through the story of a break-in at Oak Ridge, Dan Zak’s Almighty explores the tensions of the atomic age

By Aram Goudsouzian | July 15, 2016

In July 2012 three protesters, including an elderly nun, broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In Almighty, Washington Post reporter Dan Zak uses their story to illuminate a movement of dissenters against nuclear weapons. Zak will discuss the book at the East Tennessee History Center Auditorium in Knoxville on August 4, 2016, at 7 p.m.

An Assault on Making Sense

Odie Lindsey’s debut story collection, We Come to Our Senses, details the dirty secrets of deployment

By Beth Waltemath | July 14, 2016

In his debut collection, We Come to Our Senses, Odie Lindsey challenges the grand narratives of war with stories of the self-destructive impulses of the men and women forever changed by it. Lindsey will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 21, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 28, at the Southern Festival of Books October 14-16, and at Vanderbilt University on November 10. All events are free and open to the public.

Every Man for Himself

Donald Ray Pollock’s The Heavenly Table, set in 1917, reveals desperate hardship among the rural poor

By Sean Kinch | July 13, 2016

Donald Ray Pollock’s new novel, The Heavenly Table, charts the path of the Jewett Gang, three brothers and bank robbers fated to meet Eula and Ellsworth Fiddler, Ohio farmers plagued by bad luck and worse decisions. Pollock will discuss The Heavenly Table at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on July 19, 2016, at 6:30 p.m., and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16, 2016.

A Cape Canaveral of the Soul

Patrick Ryan’s new stories place buoyant, striving characters in a small patch of Florida

By Peggy Burch | July 12, 2016

Set in Cape Canaveral in the late twentieth century, Patrick Ryan’s stories conjure a rich variety of intriguing souls, from a pregnant teen who wants to be Miss America to a gay sixteen-year-old with a crush on an ex-astronaut. Ryan will discuss The Dream Life of Astronauts in conversation with Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher