In Nashville’s New Americans, Sheri Sellmeyer profiles more than 30 first-generation immigrants from all over the world, describing the many ways they enrich the life and culture of the city. Sellmeyer will discuss the book at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on April 11.
Rickey Fayne reimagines the Mephistophelean myth in his sumptuous novel The Devil Three Times, a multigenerational Black saga that limns the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow South, and even the legend of blues maestro Robert Johnson.
“There is a lot of human frailty floating around,” observes Nancy Lemann in The Ritz of the Bayou, her account of the 1985 racketeering trial of Edwin Edwards, Louisiana’s colorful, crooked governor. Lemann’s sharp eye for the human frailty at work within a veritable circus of corruption earned the little-known book enduring respect from Lemann’s fans. Hub City Press makes The Ritz of the Bayou available to a new audience with a 40th anniversary edition that includes an introduction by critic James Wolcott and a new afterword by the author.
David George Haskell’s How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries provides a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of all life on Earth (including us) by focusing on one small, beautiful aspect of it. Haskell will speak at Sewanee: The University of the South on March 25, Warner Parks Nature Center in Nashville on March 26, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on March 27. He’ll deliver the keynote address for Trails and Trilliums in Beersheba Springs on April 11.
The Water Women, a novel by Bonnie Blaylock, tells the decades-long story of a fictional family of women dedicated to the historical harvesting of “byssus,” long keratin fibers produced by a particular type of mollusk found in abundance around the Italian island of Sardinia, where the story takes place. Blaylock will appear at Reading Rock Books in Dickson on April 2.
Nashville poet Donovan McAbee’s first full-length collection, Holy the Body, brims with depictions of the spiritual life that refuse dogma or sentimental cliché. McAbee will discuss Holy the Body at a book launch event at Woodmont Christian Church in Nashville on March 24, with featured guests including Ciona Rouse, Thomm Jutz, Mark Jarman, and Mary Gauthier.
