August 21, 2013 In dark, poetic, and often brilliant prose, Michael Hainey’s wrenching autobiography, After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Story, sets out to uncover long-held secrets and discover the truth about a death in the family that has haunted Hainey for decades. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013. All events are free and open to the public.
August 20, 2013 Born in Haiti and raised there by her extended family until she joined her parents in the U.S. when she was twelve, Edwidge Danticat is a writer who can interpret both cultures, and she has a keen eye for the tensions between them. In Claire of the Sea Light, she offers a story of modern Haiti and its enduring spirit. Danticat will appear at the Nashville Public Library on August 28 at 6:30 p.m.
August 19, 2013 James McBride earned universal praise and worldwide recognition for The Color of Water, his classic memoir of growing up black with a white mother in 1960s New York. His subsequent books—including Miracle at St. Anna, a novel adapted into the 2008 film by Spike Lee—have grappled with the problem of race and the legacy of slavery. In The Good Lord Bird, McBride returns to these themes but with a starkly different approach. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.
August 16, 2013 Philip Mudd’s Takedown purports to be Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda, and in some sense it is. More than that, though, it is a consideration of the way the American intelligence establishment responded to 9/11 and subsequent terrorist threats. It’s also a career memoir: Mudd, who now lives in Memphis, began in 1985 as a junior intelligence analyst at the CIA and rose to important managerial positions at both the CIA and the FBI. A dedicated insider, he respects the context in which he flourished and the people he worked with in the complex counterterrorist bureaucracy.
August 15, 2013 By day, the hero of No Regrets, Coyote, a thriller by award-winning novelist John Dufresne, is a divorced therapist and amateur actor carrying on a platonic affair with his high-school sweetheart, whose husband thinks Coyote is gay. By night, he is a volunteer forensic consultant for the Everglades County Police Department, whose latest case involves the Christmas Eve massacre of a mother and three children and the subsequent suicide of their father. Or what looks like suicide. Dufresne will discuss No Regrets, Coyote at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on August 20, 2013, at 6 p.m.
August 14, 2013 As a young English professor in the late 1960s, author and literary critic Gerald Duff held appointments at both Vanderbilt and Kenyon, where he came into frequent close contact with the major poets and critics of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. In Fugitive Days, Duff shares both comic and poignant tales of his encounters with Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson. He also examines the impact of the Fugitives’ poetry, the New Criticism, and the controversial Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, on the American literary landscape.
