January 8, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling 2004 novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is set against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil-rights movement. In The Invention of Wings Kidd turns the clock back further—to the slave-holding South prior to the Civil War. Kidd will discuss the book at 6:15 p.m. on January 15, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.
January 6, 2013 The literary culture of Tennessee is as varied as the landscape of the state, and The Southern Poetry Anthology captures this diversity in the breadth of its selections. From West Tennessee’s Lisa Roney to East Tennessee’s Jeff Daniel Marion, and from nationally celebrated poets like Charles Wright to less familiar talents like Jeff Hardin and Kevin Thomason, the anthology includes a broad array of talent.
December 12, 2013 Novelist Katherine Paterson is married to a Presbyterian minister, and during each Christmas Eve service it has been his custom to read aloud an inspirational story written for the occasion by his wife, the author of Bridge to Terabithia. Many of these stories have now been collected in a new volume titled A Stubborn Sweetness and Other Stories for the Christmas Season.
December 11, 2013 In Diddy Wah Diddy, Memphis author Corey Mesler offers up a collage of short pieces that create a fanciful fictional history of Beale Street, the birthplace of the blues. Mesler calls the book a “collage novel,” a hint about the rich mix of fantasy, wordplay, and good-hearted bawdiness to be found therein.
December 10, 2013 Frank Joyner feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. Natural-gas drilling, known as “hydrofracturing,” has come to his town, and many of his neighbors have already made deals to allow drilling on their land. Now Frank feels responsible for holding off the collapse of his community. In Fractures, UT grad Lamar Herrin plumbs the fissures of both family and land.
December 9, 2013 In The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Pulitzer Prize-winner Doris Kearns Goodwin has produced an enlightening, timely account of not one but two of America’s most important peacetime presidents and the social and political revolution they engineered. Goodwin will discuss The Bully Pulpit as part of the Salon@615 series in the Paschall Theater at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on December 12, 2013, at 6:15 p.m.
