February 27, 2014 In her previous story collection, Birds of America, Lorrie Moore toed the line between tragic and comic with a grace few writers manage. Stories with heartbreaking premises, delivered with a heaping spoonful of wry wit: this is Moore’s brand of genius, and it is again revealed in Bark, a volume of eight stories whose arrival is a bona fide Big Event in the world of literary fiction—and not just in Moore’s new hometown of Nashville.
February 26, 2014 Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the 2014 Nashville Reads book selection, is interested in memory and language and story, perhaps because Rosemary has been struggling with the story of her own life since she was five years old, when her unusual sister Fern disappeared, inflicting a trauma so deep that neither Rosemary nor her family has ever fully recovered. The Nashville Reads Kickoff event, “Drop Everything and Read,” will be held March 3, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library at 2 p.m. Guest readers include Mayor Karl Dean, novelist Ann Patchett, and songwriter Janis Ian, among others. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.
February 25, 2014 Faking Normal by Nashville resident Courtney C. Stevens is a gripping debut novel for young adults. In the story, a sixteen-year-old girl who acts as if everything is fine is compelled, for better or worse, to reckon with and expose the demons from her past. Courtney C. Stevens will discuss Faking Normal at Nashville’s Parnassus Books on February 25, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
February 24, 2014 “In the decades since first encountering Walden in my late teens, I had often glimpsed Thoreau as the bearded sage of literature, natural history, or civil liberties,” writes Michael Sims. “I had seldom met the awkward young man who loved to sing, who ran a private school and applied his engineering skills to the pencil business, who popped popcorn and performed magic tricks for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, faced his own illnesses and the deaths of loved ones, and tried to make it as a freelance writer in New York City.” In The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Sims offers a portrait of a young man who went on to mold both American literature and American identity. Sims will appear at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville on April 11, 2014, with a book-signing at 6 p.m. and a free public address at 7 p.m.
February 19, 2014 A delight from beginning to end, Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now is filled with unlikely characters whose pain and longing are so real that readers celebrate each small step they take toward something like wholeness. As Quick’s protagonist, Bartholomew Neil, says, “Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t. And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?” Matthew Quick will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.
February 18, 2014 Elizabeth Spencer’s story collection, Starting Over, explores the exquisite tension between husbands and wives, parents and children, familial belonging and the yearning of the individual heart. Spencer has published seven previous story collections, and she won the first of her five O. Henry prizes in 1960. She is, by any measure, a master of the form, and the stories in Starting Over show all the deftness and insight for which she has long been known.
