Monsters and Memories
July 2, 2013 “Standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment,” says the adult narrator of the new novel by fantasy-master Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He is recalling a three-week school holiday in Sussex when he was seven years old, and the strange events that transpired—events both unforgettable and near-impossible to remember. Gaiman will appear at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville on July 10 as part of the Salon@615 series. This will be Gaiman’s final author tour. Tickets are $30 and include a copy of the book. Click here for complete ticketing information.
June 25, 2013 In 1936, James Agee wrote an article for Fortune that was never published in the magazine but eventually became his landmark book with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Presumed lost until it was uncovered in Agee’s papers in 2003, the original article—with a new selection of Evans’s photos—has just been released as Cotton Tenants: Three Families, a graceful and impassioned piece of journalism that powerfully conveys the human cost of a cruel economic system.
June 24, 2013 Anna Rosenthal is a thirty-five-year-old widow who can’t seem to move on with her life. Enter her estranged grandmother, Goldie, who demands that Anna drive her across country to return a set of Japanese prints that have been in her possession since World War II. The resulting journey could take the form of either farce or tragedy, but Dana Sachs makes The Secret of the Nightingale Palace a much more nuanced look at love, loss, and the secrets every life holds.
June 19, 2013 Philipp Meyer’s novel The Son ranges across Texas history from the years of the Republic to the oil boom of the 1980s, from the Comanches of the West to the Mexican ranches in the South, portraying a state steeped in violence and injustice. Focused on three generations of a single family, the novel punctures myths of the independent cowboy and the virtuous Native American, but it also provides a nostalgic view of a beautiful land all-too-quickly destroyed by commercial exploitation. Meyer will discuss The Son at 
June 18, 2013 In Liminal Zones: Where Lakes End and Rivers Begin Kim Trevathan chronicles his kayak and canoe journeys upstream from flatwater, current-less lakes and reservoirs to places where rivers rise above the flooding and come alive. In this book that is both narrative and meditative, Trevathan samples rivers from Massachusetts to California to South Carolina, but he keeps returning to the rivers of Tennessee and Kentucky, his homeland.
June 12, 2013 Early in his new memoir, Nashville author J.M. Blaine responds with humor when asked about his job as a late-night crisis counselor: “I’ve made tens of dollars in mental health,” he says, pointing to his battered Saturn. But the truth is more complex, and Midnight, Jesus & Me is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that describes Blaine’s own unusual spiritual journey.