News & Notes

August 29, 2012 At first Knoxville novelist and The Huffington Post space blogger Margaret Lazarus Dean didn’t plan “to write about the death of Neil Armstrong.” For her, it felt like a personal loss, coming so soon after the death of Armstrong’s fellow space pioneer Sally Ride. Nevertheless, Dean, who has loved NASA since childhood, seems to have found a way to reflect on the brighter parts of the astronauts’ legacies.

August 24, 2012 Legendary musician Steve Earle has announced that he is writing a memoir for Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. The memoir will be “a literary work in three acts,” reports Rolling Stone: “The first act will tell the story of his friendship with mentor Townes Van Zandt. Next comes Earle’s ‘bottoming out’ in Nashville, where he was sent to prison and eventually got clean.

August 23, 2012 Killer Nashville, a yearly “Conference for Thriller, Suspense, and Mystery Writers and Literature Lovers” begins today at the Hutton Hotel in downtown Nashville. Registration is still available for this conference that, “Unlike other conferences and seminars… offers five different learning tracks for those with varied interests and experience levels: a Writing Track, a Publishing Track, a Career Management & Promotion Track, a Forensic Track, and a Fan Track,” according to its website.

August 23, 2012 Entertainment Weekly said it best: “Does this sound like the best book club meeting ever?” In a recent post on its “Book Shelf” blog, the publication announced that J.K. Rowling will make a rare U.S. appearance to promote her new novel, The Casual Vacancy.

Can you guess who will be speaking alongside Rowling on the stage at New York City’s Lincoln Center?

August 20, 2012 As the summer goes on, Kristen Iversen’s sobering new memoir, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, continues to grab the attention of readers. Critics have noticed that the Memphis writer’s style ranges from deeply expressive to factually journalistic in this book, giving it an element of appeal to many different readers.