Book Reviews

“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.

In Another Appalachia, Neema Avashia explores what it is like to grow up both gay and the daughter of immigrants, making sense of life as both insider and outsider.

In the 19th century, large numbers of Appalachians supported themselves by harvesting herbs, roots, and other botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands. These “sang diggers,” as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance in the medicinal botanical trade are the focus of Luke Manget’s Ginseng Diggers.

The ambitious heroine of Election returns in Tom Perrotta’s latest novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Perrotta will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 16.

In Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection of fiction, How Strange a Season, tough women who are fed up with compromise and betrayal decide to scrap their lives and start anew, elsewhere.

Two young women come together to take part in an all-female Mardi Gras krewe in Diane C. McPhail’s second novel, The Seamstress of New Orleans. McPhail will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on June 9.