March 24, 2014 Susan Minot’s new novel, Thirty Girls, is based on the 1996 kidnapping of Ugandan schoolgirls by warlord Joseph Kony and his army. Minot will join fiction writer Lorrie Moore in a joint reading at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy on March 29, 2014, at 4 p.m. This event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
March 13, 2014 Evan Stoess spends twelve years as the only poor kid at a prep school for the overprivileged, an experience that offers incentive aplenty for him to strive for wealth, to prove he’s worthy of his peers—better, even. What is Evan willing to do for wealth and fame? That’s the central question of Eat What You Kill, a financial thriller by former Nashvillian Ted Scofield.
March 13, 2014 Bill Cotter’s new novel, Parallel Apartments, set mainly in Austin, centers on three generations of women whose lives have been upended by unplanned pregnancies. This densely peopled novel is replete with outrageous events intended to provoke and titillate, but at its heart it explores the nature of desire and the consequences of dubious decisions. Bill Cotter will read from Parallel Apartments at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 18, 2014, at 6 p.m.
March 12, 2014 In A Late Encounter With the Civil War Vanderbilt English professor Michael Kreyling continues the examination of collective memory he began in 2010 with The South That Wasn’t There. By examining a variety of sources high and low, Kreyling argues persuasively that—channeling Faulkner’s famous aphorism—“The past is never dead—it’s not even past.” Michael Kreyling will introduce the James Franco film version of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Cinema on March 13, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
February 27, 2014 In her previous story collection, Birds of America, Lorrie Moore toed the line between tragic and comic with a grace few writers manage. Stories with heartbreaking premises, delivered with a heaping spoonful of wry wit: this is Moore’s brand of genius, and it is again revealed in Bark, a volume of eight stories whose arrival is a bona fide Big Event in the world of literary fiction—and not just in Moore’s new hometown of Nashville.
February 26, 2014 Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the 2014 Nashville Reads book selection, is interested in memory and language and story, perhaps because Rosemary has been struggling with the story of her own life since she was five years old, when her unusual sister Fern disappeared, inflicting a trauma so deep that neither Rosemary nor her family has ever fully recovered. The Nashville Reads Kickoff event, “Drop Everything and Read,” will be held March 3, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library at 2 p.m. Guest readers include Mayor Karl Dean, novelist Ann Patchett, and songwriter Janis Ian, among others. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.
