“To tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what the hell is going on,” says Russell Gaines, the reckless but noble protagonist of Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road. Smith is a Southern master in the tradition of Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell, but with a soulful, generous voice that’s all his own. He will discuss Desperation Road at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 20 at 6:30 p.m.
With Lincoln in the Bardo, his long-awaited first novel, George Saunders delivers a strikingly original work of fiction as strange as it is stirring. On February 24 at 6:30 p.m., Saunders will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville as part of the Salon@615 series.
Tim Gautreaux’s wide-ranging new collection, Signals, expertly examines a variety of broken lives, speaking plainly of suffering but also offering glimpses of hope and redemption. He will discuss Signals at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on January 19, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 1.
To writers and scholars who have followed his career for decades, Cormac McCarthy is as notorious for his perceived reclusiveness as for his astonishing body of work. With Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King takes a deep dive into the McCarthy Archive at Texas State University and emerges with a lucid account of McCarthy’s transition from Tennessee to the Southwest.
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.
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.
