Sullen Comfort
August 1, 2013 Steve Yarbrough has earned a devoted readership for evocative, emotionally searing stories and novels about his native Mississippi. With The Realm of Last Chances, he turns to his adopted home state of Massachusetts, delivering a strikingly sensitive portrait of Kristin and Cal, an unlikely couple forced by the recession to move cross-country, and Matt, a young interloper whose own thwarted circumstances kindle a spiritual kinship with Kristin that becomes to each of them as necessary as it is doomed. Yarbrough will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. August 6, 2013.
July 30, 2013 The stories of three generations of hard-living, wife-leaving, dream-chasing musicians run through Long Gone Daddies, the debut novel by Memphis writer David Wesley Williams. A coming-of-age story, pilgrimage tale, and homage to the city of Memphis, Williams’s novel delivers a gritty saga in lyrical prose that swings from sly humor to despair with the gutsy style of a great blues song. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 26, 2013 The eighteen contributors to An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots are a multicultural group: black, white, Native American, Asian, Latina, lesbian, straight—and that’s not even a complete list of their declared identities. But for all the writers’ apparent diversity, the personal essays in this collection reveal them to be sisters under the skin. Americans don’t like to acknowledge the profound, lingering influence of class, but the stories that Vanderbilt professor Lorraine López has collected in An Angle of Vision describe a set of experiences shaped by poverty that is shared across all boundaries of color and community. Feelings and memories echo so insistently throughout the book that the writers seem almost to be speaking with a single voice. Lopez will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 23, 2013 In 2008, Vanderbilt graduate and popular humorist Roy Blount Jr. became a modern-day Samuel Johnson with his twentieth book, Alphabet Juice, an eclectic—and often hysterical—dictionary of words and phrases that struck the author’s fancy. His new sequel, Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, is funnier still. Blount will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 22, 2013 “I was an eleven-year-old kid standing on a street corner in Memphis in short pants,” observes the narrator of Vince Vawter’s Paperboy. “I felt like I was so small that I would be blown away if the slightest puff of wind came up. But you didn’t have to worry about any kind of a breeze showing up on a late July afternoon in Memphis.” Paperboy is a rare treat: a gentle coming-of-age story that manages to be smart, funny, poignant, and original—the perfect marriage of style and substance—with a narrative voice that rings true. Vawter will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 18, 2013 Bobbie Ann Mason’s most recent novel is simultaneously a tale of adapting to old age, a charming romance, a food-and-wine tour of Paris and Provence, and a spellbinding World War II suspense thriller. The Girl in the Blue Beret is a richly satisfying page turner and an artful literary novel worthy of a wide audience and a prominent place in its acclaimed author’s award-winning body of work. Mason will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 