This World of Broken Sins
In Henry Wise’s debut novel Holy City, a tormented police officer investigates a murder that digs up secrets the county would rather keep buried. Wise will appear at Novel in Memphis on June 2.
Book Reviews
Loving Country
The music scene in Nashville is tricky and hard to describe until you figure out how obsessed the city is with the relationship between conformity and rebellion. Brian Fairbanks provides plenty of detail about the full-cylinder lives of country music iconoclasts Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings in Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever.
Different Worlds
Susan Beckham Zurenda’s new novel, The Girl from the Red Rose Motel, examines the challenges faced by high school lovers from opposite sides of the tracks in small-town South Carolina. Zurenda will be the keynote speaker for the 2024 Clarksville Writers Conference at Austin Peay State University on June 5-7.
Tiny, Memorable Moments
Prolific Murfreesboro poet Gaylord Brewer turns his hand to short nonfiction in Before the Storm Takes It Away, his latest from Red Hen Press. While the structure of the 125 pieces here may project Brewer’s voice in a different light, Brewer’s fans and new readers alike will relish the opportunity to walk with the poet on his personal journey through the seasons of the year captured in this collection.
Perils and Prospects
From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, a new anthology edited by historians Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr., gives academics and lay people alike fresh ways to consider the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter.
A Moral Revolution
Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy’s Our Kindred Creatures is a provocative, sometimes disturbing examination of Americans’ evolving attitudes toward animals from 1866 to 1896. The authors will appear at The Bookshop in Nashville on May 23.
