June 18, 2014 Without violating the spirit of the folktale, Tracy Barrett reinvents the Cinderella story with a sensibility that is distinctly modern. In The Stepsister’s Tale, female independence and solidarity matter far more than male gallantry, but the romance and hopeful essence of the original remain. Barrett will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
June 17, 2014 In The Rosie Project by Australian novelist Graeme Simsion, Don Tillman launches a campaign to find a wife. A genetics professor who’s never been in love, Don prepares an exhaustive questionnaire designed to exclude all women who offend his sense of logic. Then he meets the chaotic Rosie Jarman. Simsion will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 22, 2014, at 2 p.m.
June 16, 2014 In Lisa Howorth’s debut novel, Flying Shoes, Mary Byrd Thornton’s eccentric small-town world is disrupted by a call that unearths memories her family would rather forget. Howorth will discuss Flying Shoes at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m., and at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on July 10, 2014.
June 12, 2014 George Singleton’s new story collection, Between Wrecks, features outcast characters who perpetuate the myth of Southern freakishness while also giving that lore new preoccupations: these uproarious stories are entrenched in the South while preserving an ironic distance from it. Singleton will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 15, 2014, at 2 p.m.
June 11, 2014 Based on the story of notorious Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen, who murdered as many as twenty-one women near Anchorage between 1971 and 1983, the bad guy of Resurrection Bay, jointly written by Steven Womack and Wayne McDaniel, is Decatur Kaiser, baker by day and butcher by night. Edgar Award-winning novelist Steven Womack will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 17, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
June 5, 2014 Jim Stegner, the protagonist of Peter Heller’s new novel, The Painter, is an archetypal American individualist in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Jackson Pollock. Finding himself in the midst of a deadly conflict that puts him at odds with both the police and a pair of vengeful outlaws, Stegner still somehow manages to create art that evokes in his audience “everything they know and feel and love, and all the things they don’t know, and some of the things they hope.” Peter Heller will discuss The Painter at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 12, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
