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.
December 4, 2013 From 1954, when he performed alongside the teenaged Elvis Presley, to his 2003 rendition of “Hurt,” recorded in Nashville months before his death, Johnny Cash held a unique power over audiences and those who knew him. Robert Hilburn, who spent more than thirty years as the chief music critic of The Los Angeles Times, has captured the roots of that power in Johnny Cash: The Life, a rich and thorough new biography.
December 3, 2013 Karen Spears Zacharias is a veteran author of nonfiction, but her new book, Mother of Rain, is a foray into historical fiction. Set during the Depression and World War II in a close-knit community in East Tennessee, the story centers on a troubled young woman, her first baby, and their Appalachian neighbors’ good-hearted efforts to save them both.
