January 30, 2012 Science and faith seem to be continually at war in American culture, with both sides claiming exclusive hold on the truth. In Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, Memphis native Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the two, respecting both reasoned inquiry and spiritual mystery.
January 10, 2012 The publication of the first edition of Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History in 2001 was met with great appreciation among fans of mid-century comic books and comic-book artists. In the second edition, William B. Jones Jr. has incuded more than a hundred additional pages of historical facts, interviews, photos, and illustrations from the original comics, including full-color plates of iconic covers in the series. Jones calls them “as much a part of growing up in postwar America as baseball cards, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, or rock ‘n’ roll.”
January 4, 2012 Michael Sims’s new collection of Victorian detective stories, The Dead Witness, is a cornucopia of dastardly delights and surprises. Watching the characters patiently unravel knots and ingeniously solve puzzles provides the delight. The surprises are the depth and breadth of variety represented in Sims’s overview of the genre. Humor and pathos, moralism and mercy, parody and tragedy, horror and retribution—the full spectrum of the human psyche is on display in this collection. The international cast of characters features authors and protagonists alike from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. They include a mild-mannered Catholic priest and a tough-talking Virginian, a folksy Canadian tracker and a wide-eyed teenaged boy, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, a blind man, a Musketeer, a bumbler, a dilettante, and, of course, that curiously observant Englishman with a penchant for violins and opium.
December 2, 2011 The story of two performance artists, Camille and Caleb Fang, and their adult-but-dysfunctional children, Annie and Buster, Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang is at once a family drama, a series of laugh-out-loud set pieces that parody the self-involvement of artists, a scathing indictment of the culture of celebrity, and a deeply moving examination of the ways in which our families shape (and warp) us. Critics quickly lined up behind the book, which promptly became a New York Times bestseller and ended up in the movie-making hands of Nicole Kidman. No wonder The Guardian called it “an experience, rather than a mere read.” Today Chapter 16 sums up the critical response to Kevin Wilson’s smash hit.
November 28, 2011 As When She Woke opens, Hannah Payne is Hawthorne’s scarlet “A” incarnate: “When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.” In Hillary Jordan’s imaginary near-future, criminals are “chromed”—genetically modified to make their skin colors match their transgressions—and Hannah Payne’s crime begins with the letter A. Jordan will read from and sign copies of When She Woke on November 30 at 6 p.m. at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.
November 21, 2011 In her new novel, Kingsport native Lisa Alther uses as a plot device the racial and familial intermarriage that was once common in the Appalachians. Combining the factual relevance of a history book with the intrigue and passion of a romance novel, Washed in the Blood follows the descendants of Diego Martin, a sixteenth-century hog drover abandoned by a Spanish expeditionary party. As centuries pass––and Spanish, English, Portuguese, African, and Native American blood becomes increasingly intermingled––successive generations of Martins struggle with notions of identity and the fickle nature of love.
