Octopus is popular in cuisines around the world, creating a level of demand that naturally inspires interest in farming it — but that’s easier said than done, as Richard Schweid explains in Life on the Octopus Farm. Schweid will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
In Memphis, Confederate statues and cotton festivals built the notion of a “Lost Cause,” a myth of the South that cast the Civil War as a glorious, holy, doomed crusade. In A Fight for Visibility, historian Donna Reeves details how Black Memphians challenged these public spaces and rituals, establishing their own vision of the past.
In The Apostle of Tennessee, Joe Pagetta chronicles the work of a 19th-century Catholic priest who spent 25 years traveling Middle and West Tennessee, building churches and serving the state’s growing Catholic population. Joe Pagetta will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 19, the Tennessee State Museum on September 12, and the 2026 Southern Festival of Books on October 17-18.
More than 36% of Tennessee families experience food insecurity, yet only a handful of picture books center the issue, and few, if any, depict joy in the same way Savannah Allen’s newest book, The Yellow Postcard, does. Allen will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 21. Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee will be accepting donations at this event.
In Moving Toward Freedom, Susan O’Donovan invites a more complex understanding of how enslaved Black people defined their freedom, based on their surprisingly mobile lives. O’Donovan will be in conversation with Charles McKinney at Novel in Memphis on August 25.
In The Memphis Showboats, Keith Wood explains the glorious and depressing history of a franchise in the short-lived United States Football League. Along the way, he reveals the struggle in Memphis to achieve national respect.
