A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Q & A

Fragile

By Beth Waltemath

May 17, 2011 Hamilton Cain is a natural storyteller. During his adolescence in Chattanooga, his way with words convinced his conservative family that he was anointed to preach. But it also gained him entry into a wider and more challenging world than the one offered by his strict Southern Baptist childhood: after college at the University of Virginia, Cain became a journalist in New York City. But the discovery that his first infant son had been born with a debilitating and degenerative genetic disease sent Hamilton Cain on a search to discover what liberation and affirmation can be found in a childhood he thought he had left behind forever. This Boy’s Faith is the story of a father who learns what it means to be faithful through raising his medically fragile son.

Fragile

A Story of Love and Magic

By Susannah Felts

May 13, 2011 In The Magician’s Elephant, the 2009 novel from award-winning children’s novelist Kate DiCamillo, an orphan named Peter Duchene cannot shake the suspicion that his younger sister, who died in infancy, is out there somewhere, still alive. After a fortuneteller tells Peter that his sister does indeed live, and that an elephant will help him locate her, the boy begins to follow his doubts and hopes. Finally out in paperback, the tale that unfolds is a genuine pleasure for all ages, imbued with plentiful allegorical potential and dashes of humor, and is sure to inspire discussions about truth, honesty, and belief. Kate DiCamillo will discuss the book at DK Booksellers in Memphis on May 13 at 6 p.m.

A Story of Love and Magic

Carrie, Before Blahniks

By Fernanda Moore

April 28, 2011 New York magazine once called Candace Bushnell “the patron saint of high-end power girls, the woman who got the ball rolling on the who-needs-a-husband-when-you-have-a-doorman mentality.” In her new YA novel, Summer and the City, Bushnell tells the backstory of Carrie and friends, before they swear fealty to fashion, friendship, and social climbing. Today Bushnell talks with Chapter 16 prior to her appearances in Memphis on April 29 at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

Carrie, Before Blahniks

Baseball Through the Looking Glass

By Tina LoTufo

April 26, 2011 A breathtakingly diverse assortment of characters culled from fairy tales, nursery rhymes, mythology, folktales, children’s literature, and even Manga inhabits Fantasy Baseball by Knoxville children’s author Alan Gratz. It’s a fast-paced adventure, a thrilling come-from-behind sports story, an artistic tour de force, and a heck of a fun read.

Baseball Through the Looking Glass

Author in the Prime of His Life

By Susannah Felts

April 22, 2011 To be a fiction writer from Mississippi is to inherit a literary legacy as heavy as Gulf Coast air in August, one rippling with stories of lives both remarkable and remarkably debauched. Enter the novelist and short-story writer Brad Watson, whose fiction does not traffic in what his friend Barry Hannah dismissed as “a canned dream of the South.” Still, it is laced with just enough distinctly Southern settings and characters for a reader to feel she’s getting the real deal—a Mississippi writer who is carrying on the literary legacy of his home state. Watson will be the visiting writer at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy April 25-26. On April 25, he will give a public reading in the Pfeffer Lecture Hall at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Author in the Prime of His Life

"I Dream it Every Night"

By Ed Tarkington

April 20, 2011 When Dean Faulkner Wells was thirteen, she attended the premier of Intruder in the Dust at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family. With the spotlight shining on William Faulkner, Wells came to a dawning understanding of her uncle’s role in literature—and in the world. Now the author of a new memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, she talks with Chapter 16 about William Faulkner’s literary legacy, how her extended family wrestled with the Civil Rights movement, and why Cormac McCarthy should win the Nobel Prize. Wells will present a slide show and discuss Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 21 at 5 p.m.

"I Dream it Every Night"

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