This installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series is entirely devoted to novels and features two deftly comic tales, a searing depiction of Stalin’s gulag, a finely wrought drama set in occupied Japan, and an Appalachian story of beauty, climate change, and personal evolution.
I loved opening the bookstore alone on Sunday. I loved how it smelled — all those books with their genie-in-a-bottle dreams of love and fear, goddesses and coal miners — Sherlock Holmes on the foggy moor — barefoot Sappho — Harriet Tubman, vampires, Lassie. Often I would arrive well before noon, to have some time alone with the books.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Black Zodiac, Charles Wright pursues timeless questions of aging and mortality.
In their recently published collections, poets Denton Loving, Evie Shockley, and Susan O’Dell Underwood each find an original expression for the mingling of past and present that presses at the edges of contemporary life. Susan O’Dell Underwood and Denton Loving will appear at the 2024 Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference in Oak Ridge, April 4-6
The years from 2006 to 2010 brought a shocking financial crisis and the global Great Recession that followed, but there was happier news in the Tennessee book world, as well as a new outlet for reporting it: Chapter 16 was launched in September 2009. This seventh installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series includes two Pulitzer Prize winners, a riveting account of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and two highly praised novels.
The books in this installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series are a varied lot — two novels, one nonfiction book, and two poetry collections, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. All the authors have strong ties to the South, however, and two are Tennessee natives.
