April 15, 2015 In The Patriot Threat, Steve Berry’s latest thriller, Cotton Malone searches for evidence that the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been illegal from its inception—and that for more than a hundred years all federal income tax has been collected fraudulently. Berry will appear at the Nashville Public Library on April 22, 2015, at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series.
April 14, 2015 What Comes Next and How to Like It, Abigail Thomas’s newest memoir, both exemplifies and transcends its genre as Thomas meditates on what it means to edit life down to essentials: love, forgiveness, pleasure, and letting go. Thomas will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 21, 2015, at 6:30 p.m
April 10, 2015 Recovering drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, teenage mothers of teenage mothers, alcoholic philanderers—these are Richard Lange’s people. In his new collection, Sweet Nothing, Lange improbably draws elegant poetry and tragic, lingering beauty out of the thwarted, misbegotten denizens of twenty-first century Los Angeles. He will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis at 6:30 p.m. on April 17, 2015.
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April 8, 2015Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examines the consequences—intended and otherwise—of public shaming via the Internet. The book features interviews with otherwise ordinary people made infamous by relatively harmless missteps gone viral. Ronson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 14, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
April 7, 2015 It’s been a while since anyone produced a great American coming-of-age-novel, but Kingsport native Robert Gipe hits the mark with Trampoline, an inventive debut set in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. Narrator Dawn Jewell, fifteen, is as smart as Scout Finch, more profane than Holden Caulfield, and as tough in a fight as Mattie Ross. Gipe tells her story not only in flawless prose but also with 220 comics-style drawings that keep the book grounded in the world of an Appalachian teenager.
March 26, 2014 In Before the Volunteer State, Kristofer Ray has gathered essays from eight scholars that add layers of complexity to the superficial story Tennesseans learn in school. The real story of Tennessee begins much earlier, in the anthropological records left by Native Americans as they adapted to European contacts. Then came the influx of settlers and frontier fortune hunters, and then the wars. The birth of Tennessee was not as simple, painless, or edifying as we may have thought.
