Parsing American Education
Jarvis R. Givens’ American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation details the interconnected stories of race in the history of U.S. education.
Book Reviews
Southern Spies
Everybody Wants to Rule the World, a rollicking spy novel by Ace Atkins, is set mostly in Atlanta in 1985, known as “The Year of the Spy.” Soviet and American spycraft, combined with Atkins’ drop-dead Southern observations, creates a tale that reads like a mashup of Robert Ludlum and Charles Portis. Atkins will speak at Novel in Memphis on December 3.
Ink-Stained Elegy
In Come Again No More, David Wesley Williams resurrects the spirit of a dying newsroom with the lyrical gusto of a man both mourning and celebrating his first love. This is a novel about, among other things, the end of an era — the collapse of American newspapers, yes, but also the twilight of a man who is skeptical, rumpled, and in love with ink. David Wesley Williams will discuss Come Again No More at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on November 13.
Who is ‘You’? Who is ‘I’?
Jared Joseph’s new novel Soft Lighting contains a range of voices, all of them trying to solve life’s riddles and share their thoughts on art, love, identity, and pop culture.
What Might Have Been
“Had I changed us, made us friends, would I have turned his fate?” asks Leah Gavin, the narrator of Sheri Joseph’s novel Angels at the Gate. Loosely based on the author’s time at the University of the South in the 1980s, Joseph says the story is “about the thrill of creating oneself in youth and the paths taken and not taken that lead to regret.”
‘Knocking Apart the Bricks of Slavery’
In The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War, Tom Zoellner examines a little known but crucial driver of emancipation — the actions of enslaved people who fled their owners and forged their own destinies.
