March 26, 2013 Hilarious and heartbreaking, poignant and absurd, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the Nashville Reads book selection for 2014. The novel asks readers to consider the ways in which all creatures are connected and responsible to one another. Fowler answered questions from Chapter 16 in advance of her appearance at the Nashville Public Library on April 1, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
March 25, 2014 In his debut novel, The Visitors, Patrick O’Keeffe tells the story of a modern-day Irish immigrant who finds that the secrets and conflicts of his home village follow him to America, haunting his thoughts and pulling him toward a troubling encounter with a boyhood nemesis. Patrick O’Keeffe will discuss The Visitors at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library in Knoxville on March 31, 2014, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
March 24, 2014 Susan Minot’s new novel, Thirty Girls, is based on the 1996 kidnapping of Ugandan schoolgirls by warlord Joseph Kony and his army. Minot will join fiction writer Lorrie Moore in a joint reading at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy on March 29, 2014, at 4 p.m. This event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
March 13, 2014 Evan Stoess spends twelve years as the only poor kid at a prep school for the overprivileged, an experience that offers incentive aplenty for him to strive for wealth, to prove he’s worthy of his peers—better, even. What is Evan willing to do for wealth and fame? That’s the central question of Eat What You Kill, a financial thriller by former Nashvillian Ted Scofield.
March 13, 2014 Bill Cotter’s new novel, Parallel Apartments, set mainly in Austin, centers on three generations of women whose lives have been upended by unplanned pregnancies. This densely peopled novel is replete with outrageous events intended to provoke and titillate, but at its heart it explores the nature of desire and the consequences of dubious decisions. Bill Cotter will read from Parallel Apartments at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 18, 2014, at 6 p.m.
March 12, 2014 In A Late Encounter With the Civil War Vanderbilt English professor Michael Kreyling continues the examination of collective memory he began in 2010 with The South That Wasn’t There. By examining a variety of sources high and low, Kreyling argues persuasively that—channeling Faulkner’s famous aphorism—“The past is never dead—it’s not even past.” Michael Kreyling will introduce the James Franco film version of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Cinema on March 13, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
