David and Goliath in Reverse
October 16, 2013 There was a time, not too long ago, when you could tell a lot about a Tennessean by his thoughts on the snail darter. The three-inch-long fish, a member of the perch family, lives in certain reaches of Chickamauga Creek and the Sequatchie River, both in East Tennessee. It used to live in the Little Tennessee River, too, until the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Tellico Dam, which destroyed the steady stream of fresh water that the fish needed to survive. In The Snail Darter and the Dam, Zygmunt J.B. Plater, the UT law professor who led the challenge to TVA, tells the full story.
October 15, 2013 More than twenty years have passed since the publication of The Secret History, the extraordinary international-bestselling novel that established Donna Tartt as a literary legend at age twenty-eight, and more than a decade since her most recent, the equally acclaimed The Little Friend. Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch—a coming-of-age tale that gradually evolves into a pulse-quickening thriller—is well worth the wait. Tartt will appear at the Nashville Public Library on October 22, 2013, at 6:15 p.m. as part of the 
October 9, 2013 Nonfiction author Bill Bryson is legendary for his ability to mine a readable story from a vast subject. In a twist, Bryson’s new book, One Summer: America, 1927, takes a deceptively narrow focus, describing events that occurred over a five-month period in Jazz Age America—but what a summer 1927 proved to be. Bryson will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013. All festival events are free and open to the public.
October 7, 2013 With Doomed—the sequel to 2011’s Damned—Chuck Palahniuk brings Madison Spencer back from hell to roam the earth as a specter, haunting the ex-schoolmates who once tormented her and the insufferable parents who ignored her, ultimately finding herself at the center of yet another diabolical plot by the Evil One. Chuck Palahniuk will discuss Doomed at the twenty-fifth annual 
October 3, 2013 In Local Souls, Allan Gurganus offers up a trio of comic novellas set in fictional Falls, North Carolina, a twenty-first-century village where the insular coziness of small-town life is being diminished by newcomers, digital communication, and natural calamity. Gurganus will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013.
September 30, 2013 The Tilted World, by poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, is a novel set against the great Mississippi flood of 1927. In the book, their first literary collaboration, male and female protagonists speak in alternating chapters to create a story of both brutal action and satisfying romance. Fennelly and Franklin will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on October 4, 2013, at 5 p.m., and at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013.