In Rainbow Rainbow, a collection of 10 stories depicting trans and queer experiences, writer Lydia Conklin deftly portrays people and relationships, revealing how both survive the despair and joy of change. Conklin will discuss the book at The Porch in Nashville on November 16.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In her beguiling When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky, novelist Margaret Verble, a 2016 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, reimagines, for her own wily aims, the Nashville of a century ago, with allusions to Jim Crow, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth, and the city’s white gentry.
In his latest book of essays, Inciting Joy, poet and professor Ross Gay explores 14 ways to find joy in difficult times like these (which is to say, always). Gay appears in conversation with Adam Ross at Nashville’s Parnassus Books on November 8.
By carefully wielding dangerous points of view, Rebecca Bernard’s debut story collection, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, discovers a fascinating variety of ways to tell stories that push into risky terrain.
“We were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture,” admits Frankie, the protagonist and narrator of Sewanee author Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. Wilson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 7 and SoLit’s Club Lit Fundraiser in Chattanooga on November 17.
How does the world end? Futurist and Vanderbilt history professor Michael Bess lays out four convincing scenarios in Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them. After making well-researched arguments for the existential dangers of global warming, nukes, pandemics, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence, Bess offers hopeful antidotes to our imminent mass destruction.
