“I’m a baseball player,” 12-year-old Timothy “Pumpsie” Strickland declares. “Baseball is my life.” In Andrea Williams’ new middle-grade novel, Inside the Park, Pumpsie must overcome his fears and think fast to save the day when sinister forces threaten his beloved team, the Nashville Wildcats.
Author Chris Offutt wastes no time in the opening of The Reluctant Sheriff, as two liquor delivery drivers come across a dead body in the parking lot of a local tavern. This body is only the first to fall. Readers who’ve come to know and love Offutt’s Mick Hardin series can safely anticipate that there will be more to follow.
The opening essay of Imani Perry’s Black in Blues sets up the book’s premise: that woven throughout the story of Black life, history, and culture, you’ll find blue — the color itself, the “blues” as an expression for melancholy, and its namesake sound, the Black-born music of heartache and hope.
Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express tells the story of an 1895 train disaster through a diverse cast of passengers who represent the period’s entrenched divisions. Emma Donoghue will discuss The Paris Express at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 25.
In On Freedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder explores the possibility of a true freedom that is more than the absence of repression. Snyder will speak at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 30.
Code Name: Pale Horse, Scott Payne’s memoir of his years as an undercover agent infiltrating white supremacist groups, shines a glimmering light on our nation’s underbelly. Payne will discuss the book at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on March 27.
