June 5, 2015 Brack Pelton plans to have a birthday dinner with his uncle in a nice Charleston restaurant but instead ends up holding him as he dies. Brack has no idea why anyone would want to kill his hippie, bar-owning uncle, but he’s determined to find out. David Burnsworth will discuss his debut novel, Southern Heat, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 13, 2015, at 2 p.m.
June 4, 2015 In The Breaking Point, their ninth Body Farm novel, Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass, collectively known as Jefferson Bass, inflict every possible personal and professional disaster on their protagonist, Bill Brockton. He should break, but will he? Jefferson Bass will appear this month in Maryville, Nashville, Memphis, and at several Knoxville locations.
June 2, 2015 In Matthew Thomas’s debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves, Eileen Tumulty is determined to rise above her Irish working-class roots. When she meets Ed Leary, a scientist who is also from Queens, she thinks she has found the perfect companion to accompany her on the upward journey. Matthew Thomas will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 5, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
May 29, 2015 Death, and the Day’s Light, James Dickey’s new collection, echoes the eternal, obsessive themes of the late poet’s work: war and love, life and death, the clarifying power of a shared struggle. But these poems also reflect the concerns of a man at the end of his life. Set firmly in the physical world, they speak to the link between body and spirit: as the body breaks, the spirit builds.
May 28, 2015 High-wire acts performed by an acrobatic enchantress; a young couple making love in a giant tree in the midst of an earthquake; a drug-dealing bookstore clerk who finds a decades-old history of his neighborhood and discovers that he himself appears as a character in its pages—these are some of the elements of The Pinch, Steve Stern’s latest novel. Stern will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis at 6 p.m. on June 4, 2015.
May 27, 2015 In Jacksonland: Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab, Steve Inskeep has produced a compelling study of the interwoven lives of Jackson and Ross, as well as the struggle over land that played out between whites and Native Americans. Inskeep will appear at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville on June 2, 2015, and at the Nashville Public Library on June 4, 2015.
