October 28, 2014 Ron Rash has achieved wide recognition as a masterful craftsperson, and Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories will seal that reputation. This collection, drawn from more than twenty years of stories set in the Southern Appalachians, confirms Rash as that landscape’s foremost literary mapmaker and guide. Ron Rash will discuss Something Rich and Strange at The Skillery in Nashville on November 4, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
October 27, 2014 R.J. Palacio’s 365 Days of Wonder—a companion book to Palacio’s bestselling middle-grade novel, Wonder—is a collection of “precepts,” one for each day of the year. Palacio will speak at Harding Academy in Nashville on November 3, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. The event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
October 23, 2014 In Dry Hollow, Tennessee, Hopen Haus takes in unwed pregnant women, and head midwife Rhoda Mummau struggles to provide the best care for them even as she keeps the whole Mennonite community at arm’s length to protect a secret from her own past. For her new novel, The Midwife, Jolina Petersheim taps her Mennonite heritage to consider the question of what exactly makes a woman a mother.
October 22, 2013 Richard Schweid, a Nashville native who now lives in Barcelona, has written books on eels and cockroaches, and with Octopus he continues his fascination with the less-cute creatures of the natural world. This lively book introduces readers to a creature who is strange, tasty, and surprisingly intelligent.
October 21, 2014 In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, historian Michael Ross adapts the genres of true-crime narrative and courtroom drama to recover a forgotten story that captured national attention nearly 150 years ago. In clear, bright prose Ross deftly sorts through the complexities of Reconstruction-era politics to tell the story of two mixed-race women accused of abducting a white toddler. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 28, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
October 17, 2014 Liberal education, argues Michael S. Roth, is a tool that “matters far beyond the university because it increases our capacity to understand the world, contribute to it, and reshape ourselves. When it works, it never ends.” Roth will give a free public lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis on October 23, 2014, at 6 p.m.
