Essays | Chapter 16

Tennessee Truffles

When a beloved mother is aging and confused, The Food Channel can be a lifesaver

By Judy Loest | May 6, 2011

May 6, 2011 My mother never cared for mushrooms. “Like chewing snails,” she said. Even in healthier days, “Shew, God” was her response whenever someone mentioned mushrooms. Obviously, she agreed with Pliny who said that truffles are the excrement of the earth. But what can you expect? She grew up in Snowflake, Virginia, where mushrooms were disdained because they often sprouted from cow patties.

American Homer

For Clay Risen, Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War is this nation’s Iliad

By Clay Risen | April 13, 2011

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

Entirely His Own Man

As a teenager, Hampton Sides wanted to be a rock star, and his band practiced in the same house where Shelby Foote was writing his magnum opus

By Hampton Sides | April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011 Shelby Foote was the first writer I ever met, and the only writer I ever personally knew until I left my hometown of Memphis and went off to college. And so my image of what a writer was supposed to look like, sound like, and smell like, came first and foremost from him. I vaguely sensed even as a high-school teenager that I wanted to be a writer, but watching him, studying him, I couldn’t see how I could get there. I couldn’t see myself wielding a quill pen. My Southern accent was strong enough, but lacked Shelby’s beautiful custardy lilts and Delta diphthongs. And I knew I could never pull off a masterpiece of a beard like his.

Out of the Box

Borders and Davis-Kidd may be gone, but that doesn’t mean Nashville can’t support a bookstore

By Margaret Renkl | March 29, 2011

March 29, 2011 In a bookstore, scale matters. Educated staff matter. Community matters. A bookstore is not simply a place to buy books; it’s also a place to find kindred souls. If you already know what you want to read, Amazon is almost impossible to resist. Buying a book online is easy, it’s fast, and it’s usually cheaper than the book in the store. But it’s also a lonesome experience. You run into none of those passionate readers who can be counted on to press a much-loved book into the hands of that stranger standing before the shelf, wavering. At Amazon, you gain nothing from the experience of veteran booksellers, who can tell you with confidence, “Michiko totally blew this one.” Buying a book online is effortless, but if you need a book that will change your life, Amazon can’t help you. No search field is built to answer the question, “What book will articulate these inchoate fears keeping me awake at three a.m.?”

Anguish and Anticipation

Bestselling novelist Amy Greene describes the torture of waiting for a book to be published

By Amy Greene | March 28, 2011

March 28, 2011 Waiting for my first novel to be released was a little bit like torture, and I could almost believe that getting a book deal had been a dream. In the three years between the day my agent sold the book and the day it was officially published, there were two rounds of edits, followed by copyediting, then proofreading, and, finally, months of behind-the-scenes production and marketing that had nothing to do with me. After years of blood, sweat, and tears, my novel was out of my hands. Bloodroot would have a life of its own, and all I could do was watch.

Seeing in the Dark

John Egerton considers a new memoir by a blind man—and the whole future of book publishing

By John Egerton | March 17, 2011

March 17, 2011 The book business is in serious trouble. In Nashville alone, Zibart’s and Mills are so long-gone that most shoppers in their Hillsboro Village and Green Hills neighborhoods have never heard of them. Now Davis-Kidd is also gone, and OutLoud too, and Borders on West End is tiptoeing under a corporate-bankruptcy cloud. In Knoxville, Carpe Librum is shuttered. In Memphis, BookStar is gone, too, and the only remaining Davis-Kidd outlet in the state is in limbo because its Ohio-based corporate owners have filed for bankruptcy protection. Author John Egerton considers this blighted landscape and finds a ray of hope in the persistence of self-published authors like David Meador, who are helping to keep the literary embers warm in these distressing times. David Meador will discuss and autograph Broken Eyes, Unbroken Spirit at BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville on March 22 at 5 p.m.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher