Sonny Brewer assembles an astonishing pool of Southern writers to reflect on their day jobs
October 20, 2010 Novelist and anthologist Sonny Brewer may have hit upon the best-ever idea for an essay collection. Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit contains accounts by Pat Conroy, John Grisham, Winston Groom, and a score of other Southern writers on the sorts of work they did on their way to becoming professional writers.
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The protagonist of Susan Straight’s new novel can’t escape the past until she understands it
October 18, 2010 Traversing both the gentrified pockets and gangstaland of Los Angeles, as well as the sugar-cane fields and sweltering swampland of Louisiana, Susan Straight’s new novel is a complex work of art. Take One Candle Light a Room offers exquisitely rendered settings, lyrical prose, and a formidably large cast of characters. Its narrator, Fantine Antoine, an African American of Louisiana Creole descent and California birth, is an accomplished travel writer, but in this book she undertakes a journey unlike any she has experienced before—one that stands to alter her path permanently. Straight will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 18 at 6 p.m.
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Patrick O’Daniel records the Bluff City’s greatest disaster
October 14, 2010 In Memphis and the Superflood of 1937: High Water Blues, librarian Patrick O’Daniel has created a compact volume detailing of one of the worst floods in American history. In early 1937, the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were deluged with rain and snow, creating a disaster so far beyond anyone’s experience that the rules of flood control and disaster response had to be rewritten in the aftermath. Thanks to cooperation among federal, state, and local officials and volunteers from every walk of life, one of Memphis’s worst moments became one of its finest hours. O’Daniel will discuss the story at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 16 at 1 p.m.
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Two underemployed spelling geeks set out to rid the world of errata
October 13, 2010 In a culture dominated by texting, tweeting, and emailing—media that have accelerated the decline of spelling, grammar, and word use—it seems unlikely that a pair of twenty-somethings would be the orthographic heroes of our time, bounding across the country, Wite-Out in hand, to fix our collective mistakes. But that’s the story Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson tell in their entertaining memoir, The Great Typo Hunt. Deck and Herson will discuss the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on October 15 at 7 p.m.
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The protagonist of Laura Lippman’s new thriller hasn’t moved as far beyond the past as she believes
October 6, 2010 Laura Lippman’s new crime novel, I’d Know You Anywhere, begins where most mysteries end. The killer has been caught and incarcerated; apparently, justice has been served. Twenty years after he raped and murdered a series of young women in suburban Washington, D.C., Walter Bowman sits on Death Row awaiting execution, his appeals finally exhausted. His last request is to make contact with the one girl he kidnapped but, unlike the unfortunate others, did not kill. Lippman will read from the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 7 at 6 p.m.
Read moreA new Nashville gallery show features picture books in the making
October 4, 2010 Now on display in East Nashville’s Art & Invention Gallery is an exhibit of children’s books and related items by five familiar faces in Nashville’s art scene. Athena Workman, Bethany Taylor, Bill Elliot, Greg Morneau, and Julie Sola created the work in the gallery’s second annual Proto Pulp–Classic Books of the Future, a collection of children’s picture books-in-progress. The show runs through October 17.
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