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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
