As an Orthodox Jew, Tova Mirvis was taught from childhood that being a good wife and mother was her sacred duty, and her whole existence was shaped and bound by religious law. In her new memoir, The Book of Separation, she recalls her decision to leave her marriage and her faith community. Mirvis will appear at the Memphis Jewish Community Center on November 2 at 7 p.m.
In advance of his return to Tennessee, Chapter 16 surveys the life and work of Charles Wright, whose poems are both accessible and deeply philosophical. Wright, a native of Pickwick Dam, will do two public events at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City on October 25.
In 1952, a Soviet geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev set out to create tame foxes, with dramatic success. In How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), Belyaev’s colleague Lyudmila Trut and biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin give a detailed history of the now-famous Siberian fox study and explore its importance in solving a number of scientific mysteries. Dugatkin will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.
In No One Is Coming to Save Us, Stephanie Powell Watts takes up themes from The Great Gatsby—wealth, social position, the search for love—and explores them through a twenty-first-century African-American family in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Watts will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.
In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay tells the story of how and why she became morbidly obese and explores what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge. Gay will discuss Hunger at the Blair School of Music in Nashville on July 13, at 6:15 p.m.
In Behind the Moon, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers on a complex, hallucinatory tour of human and animal consciousness in the course of a story about a mother’s search for her lost daughter.
