A Finely Drawn Character
April 7, 2015 It’s been a while since anyone produced a great American coming-of-age-novel, but Kingsport native Robert Gipe hits the mark with Trampoline, an inventive debut set in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. Narrator Dawn Jewell, fifteen, is as smart as Scout Finch, more profane than Holden Caulfield, and as tough in a fight as Mattie Ross. Gipe tells her story not only in flawless prose but also with 220 comics-style drawings that keep the book grounded in the world of an Appalachian teenager.
March 26, 2014 In Before the Volunteer State, Kristofer Ray has gathered essays from eight scholars that add layers of complexity to the superficial story Tennesseans learn in school. The real story of Tennessee begins much earlier, in the anthropological records left by Native Americans as they adapted to European contacts. Then came the influx of settlers and frontier fortune hunters, and then the wars. The birth of Tennessee was not as simple, painless, or edifying as we may have thought.
March 20, 2015 In her new poetry collection, Many Small Fires, Charlotte Pence writes about her father’s schizophrenia through the lens of ecology. Pence will read with Adam Prince on March 26, 2015, at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville; with Adam Day on March 27, 2015, at Belmont University in Nashville; and with Bradford Tice on March 30, 2015, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. All events are free and open to the public.
March 19, 2015 Impressive artwork by Nate Powell, a gripping story by Andrew Aydin, and an eyewitness view of history from U.S. Representative John Lewis combine flawlessly in March: Book Two, the second volume of Lewis’s graphic memoir of the American civil-rights movement. This installment highlights Lewis’s Nashville-based efforts to launch Freedom Riders onto segregated bus lines throughout the South.
March 18, 2015 Jason Miller’s debut crime novel, Down Don’t Bother Me, is a clever variation on Raymond Chandler-style noir with the blue-collar soul of Chris Offutt and the wry black humor of Tom Waits. Miller will give a reading at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. on March 24, 2015, and at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis at 6:30 p.m. on March 31.
March 17, 2014 Ivoe Williams, the heroine of LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s debut novel, Jam on the Vine, is an African-American girl born in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Texas to poor, hardworking parents. The story of Ivoe’s trials and triumphs as an aspiring journalist provides a vivid depiction of the black experience during one of the ugliest periods in American history. Barnett will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 23, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.