Victor L. Wooten’s second book celebrates music as a living entity
With his second book, The Spirit of Music — a follow-up to his 2008 debut, The Music Lesson — Victor L. Wooten updates the classic hero’s journey, casting himself and a band of fellow musicians into a dire contest to save the world from an insidious enemy out to destroy music.
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Singled Out recounts the athletic feats and personal tragedies of baseball’s Glenn Burke
In Singled Out, Andrew Maraniss charts the phenomenal rise and terrible fall of Glenn Burke, a gifted athlete who struggled to conceal his sexuality at a time when there was no place for a gay man in the game of baseball. Maraniss will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 2.
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Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming is an elegy and a call to action
Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America focuses on life, breath, and death, particularly regarding Black bodies. Dyson beatifies the slain and enjoins those newly “woke” to approach social justice work with humility.
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Humor and peril collide in The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus
The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus corrals nine ambitious, verbally rich narrative worlds. Through humor or gut-punching drama, these stories showcase Gurganus’ penchant for lifting the veneer of small-town niceties, exposing the vast terrain of his characters’ interior lives.
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Kim Trevathan revisits the Tennessee River from a new direction
In Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, Maryville College professor and nature writer Kim Trevathan travels the length of the waterway a second time to discover “how the river had changed in twenty years, and how the passing of two decades had changed me.” Trevathan will discuss Against the Current at a virtual event hosted by Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 25.
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My Year Abroad traces an ordinary young man’s journey to a weird hell and back
My Year Abroad, Chang-rae Lee’s sixth novel, is an exuberant — and strange — coming-of-age tale. Lee will discuss the book with Ann Patchett at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 19.
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