March 23, 2016 Matthew Griffin’s debut novel comes to us at a pivot point in our national history. But Hide can’t be reduced to a social-justice tale, or one of love between gay men. It’s a story about the kind of love, gay or straight, that endures beyond youth, strength, and memory. Griffin will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on March 30, 2016, at 6 p.m.
March 21, 2016 Reading Julian Barnes is a paradoxical pleasure: the author makes clear, in book after book, that literature provides no reassurances, no uncanny access to wisdom or happiness, no affirmation to troubled readers—and yet the experience of reading his work is strangely comforting. Now seventy, Barnes keeps exploring profound questions and continues to produce brilliantly conflicting answers. He will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Hall in Nashville on March 23, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
March 18, 2016 In her new poetry collection, Galaxie Wagon, Darnell Arnoult addresses aging with enviable humor and wisdom. She will read from her work at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on March 24, 2016, at 6 p.m.
March 17, 2016 Chris Offutt’s father, science-fiction writer Andrew J. Offutt, died in 2013. His eldest son’s inheritance: a massive library of pornography, most of it written by Andrew Offutt himself under a variety of pseudonyms. In My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt delves into his father’s career as the “King of Smut,” as well as his own memories of a haunted, fractured childhood. Offutt will appear at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 24, 2016, at 6 p.m.
March 16, 2016 Roy Blount Jr.’s twenty-fourth book, Save Room for Pie, is an eminently readable collection of food writing and humor drawn from his work for magazines and National Public Radio. The Vanderbilt graduate will discuss his new book at the Nashville Public Library on March 22, 2016, at 6:15 p.m.
March 15, 2016 Aubrey and Josh Hamilton have been inseparable since they were tweens, and life is looking pretty good for them until Josh mysteriously disappears, and authorities finger Aubrey as the suspect. J.T. Ellison will discuss her new standalone mystery, No One Knows, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 22, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
