News & Notes

May 24, 2011 As construction begins on a Nashville road that connects the Tennessee State University campus with Centennial Park, writer John Egerton considers the significance of the names of local roads: “I found myself thinking about how much history is yielded up in the words and symbols of a good map when I saw in the paper recently that construction of a connector street between 28th and 31st avenues will be given a ceremonial send-off today, just a couple of miles west of the Metro Courthouse,” he writes in an op-ed piece for the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal.

May 16, 2011 Nobody fiddles with words better than Roy Blount Jr. A regular on National Public Radio’s quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the Vanderbilt graduate also serves as a usage adviser to The American Heritage Dictionary and has written two books—2009’s Alphabet Juice and this summer’s Alphabetter Juice—that are sort of like dictionaries in their own right, only dictionaries glossed by a master comic.

May 3, 2011 In his forthcoming novel, The Family Fang, due on shelves in August, Sewanee novelist Kevin Wilson tells the story of “a strange family of performance artists,” as he put it in an an interview with Chapter 16‘s Susannah Felts last February. “The parents have basically forced their children to take part in their artistic projects and that has, understandably, messed up the kids.

April 28, 2011 A week ago, Memphis readers were stunned to learn that Gordon Brothers—the same California-based liquidation company currently dismantling more than 200 Borders stores nationwide—had bought the sole remaining Davis-Kidd Booksellers in order to sell off its assets. But an eleventh-hour deal will keep the store operating as a hub for Memphis book-lovers: yesterday a bankruptcy judge in eastern Kentucky approved the sale of Davis-Kidd to yet another new owner, who promptly announced the store’s new name: DK Booksellers.

April 27, 2011 Khaled Mattawa was five years old when Qaddafi seized power in Libya. In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Mattawa recalls the unlikely role a dairy plant in his hometown of Misurata has played in the resistance against Qaddafi, and why Libyan forces recently targeted it in a bombing raid:

April 25, 2011 In its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, CBS Sunday Morning toured the battlefield at Franklin, where 10,000 soldiers lost their lives in one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict. Their tour guide? Bestselling novelist Robert Hicks, whose debut novel, The Widow of the South, turned Carnton Mansion into a tourist destination. “Something important happened here, this place, and in all the battlefields,” Hicks told CBS.