Editor's Note
Festival week is here at last, and we’ve got reviews of new books by three festival authors today.
In her review of Silas House’s latest novel, The Tulip Poplars, Tina Chambers notes that this chronicle of friendship that endures over decades is marked by “beautifully lyrical passages,” even as it takes on issues of race and a same-sex relationship “cloaked in fear and secrecy.”
Yiyun Li’s novel Music Against the Night, based on the lives of composer John Field and concert pianist Adelaide Percheron, “provides a vehicle for meditations on art, fame, childhood, and the Romantic Era,” writes reviewer Sean Kinch, as it tells the story of the couple’s “attempts to seek solace amid coldness and calamity.”
Bradley Sides’ novella The Volcano Keeper is centered on an Alabama farm family and the sudden, mysterious appearance of a volcano on their land. The mountain “stands seemingly dormant, except for powerful earthquakes that occur every time someone dies in their rural county,” writes Emily Choate, who finds the core of Sides’ story in the idea that “nature anticipates us because it is us. We belong to its vast, unfolding story, not the other way around.”
News Roundup
- Sundress Academy for the Arts has launched a new fundraising campaign, Writers Help Writers.
- The 2026 Nashville Public Library Literary Award recipient is poet and novelist Ocean Vuong.
- Ted Olson remembered Wendell Berry for Vox Populi.
- An essay by Nafissa Thompson-Spires appeared in Literary Hub.
- Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited was featured in Texas Monthly and The New York Times Magazine.
