In her debut novel for adults, bestselling YA novelist Diane Les Becquets pits two very different women against the wilderness, and the past
February 3, 2016 Diane Les Becquets’s new novel, Breaking Wild, follows two women on either side of a pursuit deep into the Colorado wilderness, leading to confrontations with both the past and the present. Les Becquets will discuss Breaking Wild at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 9, 20016, at 6:30 p.m.
Mary Karr celebrates the examined life in The Art of Memoir
February 1, 2016 Mary Karr, one of the contemporary masters of memoir, is a true believer in the transformative power of the form. In The Art of Memoir, she offers a short course in the joys and challenges of writing the story of your own life. She will appear in discussion with songwriter Rodney Crowell at the Green Door Gourmet in Nashville on February 6, 2016. The event is a benefit for The Porch Writers’ Collective.
Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson have collected fifteen essays on the history of the Upper Cumberland
January 28, 2016 The Upper Cumberland region—i.e. the watershed counties of the upstream half of the Cumberland River in Kentucky and Tennessee—was relatively isolated for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as a result, it was neglected by historians. Its history is rich and worth investigating, however, as editors Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson prove with People of the Upper Cumberland.
Ruta Sepetys’s new YA novel returns to the ravaged landscape—and people—of World War II
January 27, 2016 In Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys—Nashville-based author of the chillingly beautiful 2011 novel, Between Shades of Gray, about a Lithuanian family sent to a Soviet work camp—tells another tale of displacement and tragedy at the end of World War II as the Red Army advances on Prussia. Sepetys will celebrate the book’s launch at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 2, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
In Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Expatriates, Americans abroad learn to persevere
January 25, 2016 Janice Y. K. Lee’s new novel, The Expatriates, depicts the intersecting lives of three women in Hong Kong. When their world of privilege is thrown into disarray, they learn how to overcome trauma and rebuild their lives. Janice Y. K. Lee will read from The Expatriates at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
Karen Spears Zacharias’s newest novel, Burdy, is a sequel to Mother of Rain
January 22, 2016 Burdy is Karen Spears Zacharias’ second novel based on Christian Bend, “a way-back place” in the mountains of East Tennessee. It features Burdy, one of the vividly-drawn characters of that tiny community, as she tracks down a townsman presumed dead after the Normandy invasion.
