July 2, 2015 Paul Hemphill’s 1970 classic, The Nashville Sound, tells the story of Music City at a pivotal time—when country-music tradition and market-savvy innovation clashed in ways that were both singular to the moment and resonant today. The book was recently reissued by the University of Georgia Press.
July 1, 2015 Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses by University of Memphis professor Sonja Livingston takes on themes of femininity and fertility in a direct and quietly fierce style. Livingston will discuss Queen of the Fall at the Mid-South Book Festival, held in Memphis September 9-13, 2015.
June 29, 2015 Picking up just a short time after the end of his first memoir, 1988’s Willie: An Autobiography, It’s A Long Story is Willie Nelson’s examination of his own lifelong persistence and tenacity, as well as a rumination on the value of family, friends, and self-fulfillment through music.
June 26, 2015 With a subtitle—a “A Cookbook-Memoir, of Sorts”—Gaylord Brewer acknowledges that The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire resists easy categorization. And the “of sorts” quality is exactly what makes this collection of essays and recipes a must-read for home cooks who sometimes fancy themselves chefs who happen to have been spared the nuisance of a restaurant.
June 25, 2015 Anyone who lived in a cave between 1998 and 2004, when HBO aired Sex and the City—a series based on Candace Bushnell’s novel of the same name—might read Killing Monica with virgin eyes. Everyone else will find the sexcapades in Bushnell’s new book exactly what they bargained for. Bushnell will discuss Killing Monica at the Nashville Public Library on June 30, 2015, at 6:15 p.m.
June 24, 2015 “My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,” writes Jim Shepard at the outset of The Book of Aron. Eight year-old Aron’s precocity and daring prove useful when he joins forces with other Warsaw street urchins to smuggle food and supplies to their families after the Nazis overtake Poland. Shepard will appear in conversation with Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon to discuss The Book of Aron at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 26, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
