Book Reviews

July 8, 2011 UFO fetishists have long seen a connection between extraterrestrial craft and the holy scriptures. Websites, blogs, books, and documentaries have been devoted to the idea that biblical visions may refer to unidentified flying objects, but debut novelist David Halperin is the first to use such connections as a plot device. In Journal of a UFO Investigator, Halperin, a retired religious-studies professor, effectively weaves the UFO phenomenon together with issues of faith, loss, and the pain of growing up. David Halperin will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

July 5, 2011 In Ladies and Gentlemen, the follow-up to his critically acclaimed novel, Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross employs beautiful, glittering prose to tell tales of boys and girls behaving badly. Ross will discuss and sign the story collection at the Nashville Public Library on July 5 at 6:15 p.m., as part of the the Salon@615 series.

June 22, 2011 Ann Patchett first made bestseller lists with her transcendent 2001 novel, Bel Canto, the story of an international group of businessmen, diplomats, and politicians—and one opera diva—who are held hostage by terrorists in the vice-presidential palace of an unnamed Latin American country. In State of Wonder, Patchett returns to the jungle, this time to the central Amazon basin, a vast but impenetrable landscape where the air “is heavy enough to be bitten and chewed,” and insects fly “with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses” of human beings. There’s a magnificent chapter set in an opera house and the kind of chaotic market scene that’s more or less required of a novel set in an equatorial country, but the real point of this book is to get its protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, out of suburbia, away from her phone, and into “the beating heart of nowhere”—a jungle teeming with spiders, snakes, quicksand, and cannibals. Patchett will discuss State of Wonder at the Nashville Public Library on June 28, 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series.