News & Notes

December 8, 2010 Nashville-based science writer Amanda Little has made a career of writing about environmental issues—as a regular contributor to Grist and as the author of Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—A Ride to Our Renewable Future—but she recently scooped book reviewers all over the country by engaging Jonathan Franzen, this year’s most celebrated novelist, in an interview about the little-recognized environmental themes in Freedom. A sample bit of dialog:

November 23, 2010 Nashville writer Tony Earley, whose critically acclaimed novels Jim the Boy and The Blue Star are set in the mountains of western North Carolina, has been elected a new member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The organization was founded in 1987 by Southern luminaries like Cleanth Brooks, Fred Chappell, James Dickey, Shelby Foote, John Hope Franklin, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and C.

November 22, 2010 Ann Patchett is the author of five novels—not counting the forthcoming State of Wonder, which is due in June—and two books of nonfiction. Though her first published work was a short story which appeared in The Paris Review, and though she is the editor of the 2006 edition of Best American Short Stories, she is not especially well known for her own short fiction. Fortunately, the Holiday Fiction Issue of The Washington Post offers a rare example of Patchett’s mastery of the short-story form:

November 18, 2010 A “dazzle of possibilities is perhaps what we stand to lose most when one more bookstore closes,” Nashville novelist Adam Ross writes in a valediction for Davis-Kidd Booksellers in today’s issue of the Nashville Scene. “It’s a step closer to the end of serendipity.