Book Reviews

“We were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture,” admits Frankie, the protagonist and narrator of Sewanee author Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. Wilson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 7 and SoLit’s Club Lit Fundraiser in Chattanooga on November 17.

How does the world end? Futurist and Vanderbilt history professor Michael Bess lays out four convincing scenarios in Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them. After making well-researched arguments for the existential dangers of global warming, nukes, pandemics, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence, Bess offers hopeful antidotes to our imminent mass destruction.

A cult hero for the first half of his career, Cormac McCarthy is now a literary institution. As he approaches 90, he delivers two companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which fuse dizzying intellectual exploration with his trademark gift for depicting outsiders drawn unwillingly into gripping intrigues with lethal consequences.

Joy Harjo’s Catching the Light offers short vignettes on the meaning of language, poetry, and place, taking us to a realm between ordinary reality and artistic vision.

In Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult, Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson profile religious leaders, entertainers, psychic mediums, healers, activists, and more, from Puritan New England to the witch-friendly grounds of social media today.

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s The Decomposition of Jack features a boy whose daily chores include the collection of roadkill. It’s a slightly gross, very funny, sweetly poignant story about so much more than death. Tubb will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 26.