February 1, 2016 Mary Karr, one of the contemporary masters of memoir, is a true believer in the transformative power of the form. In The Art of Memoir, she offers a short course in the joys and challenges of writing the story of your own life. She will appear in discussion with songwriter Rodney Crowell at the Green Door Gourmet in Nashville on February 6, 2016. The event is a benefit for The Porch Writers’ Collective.
January 28, 2016 The Upper Cumberland region—i.e. the watershed counties of the upstream half of the Cumberland River in Kentucky and Tennessee—was relatively isolated for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as a result, it was neglected by historians. Its history is rich and worth investigating, however, as editors Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson prove with People of the Upper Cumberland.
January 27, 2016 In Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys—Nashville-based author of the chillingly beautiful 2011 novel, Between Shades of Gray, about a Lithuanian family sent to a Soviet work camp—tells another tale of displacement and tragedy at the end of World War II as the Red Army advances on Prussia. Sepetys will celebrate the book’s launch at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 2, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
January 25, 2016 Janice Y. K. Lee’s new novel, The Expatriates, depicts the intersecting lives of three women in Hong Kong. When their world of privilege is thrown into disarray, they learn how to overcome trauma and rebuild their lives. Janice Y. K. Lee will read from The Expatriates at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
January 22, 2016 Burdy is Karen Spears Zacharias’ second novel based on Christian Bend, “a way-back place” in the mountains of East Tennessee. It features Burdy, one of the vividly-drawn characters of that tiny community, as she tracks down a townsman presumed dead after the Normandy invasion.
January 19, 2016 In My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout takes readers into the mind and heart of a woman who has survived a troubled childhood, revealing a spirit that is both beautiful and deeply wounded. Strout will appear at the Nashville Public Library on January 21, 2016.
