Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone depicts a family grappling with a legacy of suicide
In Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett uses multiple points of view to limn the collateral consequences of a father’s suicide and a tight-knit family’s history of depression. Haslett will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16, 2016. Festival events are free and open to the public.
Read more
With Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers a contemporary adaptation of Pride & Prejudice
The Austen Project has commissioned six contemporary authors to write modern adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. Tasked with the daunting challenge of reimagining the beloved Pride & Prejudice, bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has delivered Eligible, an inventive and irreverent update to a revered tale. Sittenfeld will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 14-16, 2016. All festival events are free and open to the public.
Read more
Novelist Ed Tarkington reflects on the deep ambivalence that lies at the heart of Peter Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Summons to Memphis
June 17, 2016 In the sixth of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, novelist Ed Tarkington considers the problematic culture depicted in Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
Richard Russo returns with Everybody’s Fool, a sequel to one of his best-loved novels
May 23, 2016 With Everybody’s Fool, Richard Russo returns to North Bath, New York, stomping grounds of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, one of recent fiction’s most endearing heroes. In this sequel to Nobody’s Fool, the gang’s all back, ten years older but no less susceptible to the slings and arrows of hardscrabble life in Bath. Russo will give a free public reading at the Nashville Public Library on May 31, 2016, at 6:15 p.m.
In Apostle, Tom Bissell journeys into the contradictory history of early Christianity
April 12, 2016 In Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, the audaciously gifted Tom Bissell merges travel narrative, popular history, and literary criticism to examine the evolution of Christianity from its early years to the present. Bissell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 14, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
In My Father, the Pornographer, acclaimed novelist Chris Offutt confesses a dubious legacy
March 17, 2016 Chris Offutt’s father, science-fiction writer Andrew J. Offutt, died in 2013. His eldest son’s inheritance: a massive library of pornography, most of it written by Andrew Offutt himself under a variety of pseudonyms. In My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt delves into his father’s career as the “King of Smut,” as well as his own memories of a haunted, fractured childhood. Offutt will appear at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 24, 2016, at 6 p.m.
