Book Reviews

April 1, 2013 Elizabeth Strout’s collection of linked stories, Olive Kittredge, earned the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for its evocative portrait of the triumphs and tragedies of a small Maine town. Strout’s follow-up, The Burgess Boys, returns to Maine but widens its scope by revisiting the hardscrabble town of Shirley Falls from the point of view of two brothers who have escaped a scarred family history. They are drawn back to town by a strange crime which unearths long-buried tensions that will change their lives irrevocably. Elizabeth Strout and her editor, Susan Kamil, will appear in Nashville on April 8 at 7 p.m. to discuss The Burgess Boys as part of the Salon@615 series. The event will be held in the Frances Bond Davis Theater at the Harpeth Hall School, and Parnassus Books will be on hand with book sales. The event is free and open to the public.

March 20, 2013 Eden Rise by Robert J. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, contains both a lively narrative and a deep historical understanding of the atmosphere of the small-town South at the height of the civil-rights movement. Set in 1960s Alabama, the novel’s plot centers on a murder trial, and the book is a fine addition to the genre of Southern courtroom dramas that capture the tension between the objective reality of racial injustice and the subjective desire of most of the white population to deny it, justify it, or cast themselves as its true victims.

March 19, 2013 In 1958, institutional racism infected all life in the deep South. Because of distant threats—court decisions, freedom riders, and the like—its influence was perhaps more entrenched than ever. Yet many whites seemed oblivious to its pernicious effects. In James Williamson’s novel, The Ravine, a thirteen-year-old boy from a privileged white family in Memphis spends the summer in a small Mississippi community, where a violent tragedy changes his life profoundly.

March 13, 2013 Cary Holladay’s lyrical new collection of linked stories, Horse People, follows various members of a prosperous family in Orange County, Virginia, from the Civil War through World War II and beyond. Holladay crafts small, intimate portraits of her characters as they confront timeless themes of birth and death, compassion and cruelty, memory and loss, and the many guises of both cowardice and courage. She will read from and sign copies of Horse People at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 22 at 5:30 p.m., and in Buttrick Hall, Room 101, on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville on March 28 at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.