News & Notes

July 6, 2011 Michael Knight’s transcendent novel The Typist won’t be out in paperback till next month, but O magazine is recommending it for the beach bag nonetheless. In the summer-reading guide, Tiffany Sun praises its “quiet, spare prose,” noting: “With The Typist, Knight paints a picture of military ennui in a city facing desperate economic times, giving us beautifully drawn characters who are at once vulnerable and unknowable as they seek solace, diversion—and eventually, purpose—amid instability.”

July 1, 2011 The sign isn’t up yet, and the news was grim for a long time, so it’s perhaps understandable that Ashley Dacus, public-relations and events coordinator at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, keeps getting asked when Davis-Kidd Booksellers will close. In fact, it isn’t closing; it’s growing. According to a feature in this week’s Memphis Flyer, owner Neil Van Uum has big plans for the new/old store:

June 20, 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean didn’t become an astronaut, but the Knoxville novelist’s debut book, The Time It Takes to Fall (2007), required a detailed understanding of astrophysics and of the specific conditions that led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Now, in an new essay in The Huffington Post, Dean explains where her love of space missions came from, and pays tribute to her father, who, Saturday after Saturday, took her to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC., when she was a child:

June 16, 2011 In the June edition of “SoLost,” The Oxford American‘s series of original videos that celebrate the art of getting lost in “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” novelist William Gay, who normally shuns recorded interviews, invited a camera into his Hohenwald cabin, where he proceeded to talk with eloquence about his hometown, his work, and how his repeated playing of a Bob Dylan tune once inspired a girlfriend to walk out: “She dumped me over that song,” he explains, deadpan.