Maria Browning

April 21, 2016 Sonja Livingston’s second essay collection, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, is a kind of literary search-and-rescue effort. In twenty-one delicately crafted pieces, she brings forth a remarkable group of little-known women and girls from the past, imagining her way into their lives with lyrical intensity. Livingston will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

March 29, 2016 Written from a perspective shaped by a passionate, unorthodox sympathy for dogs, Vanderbilt University professor Colin Dayan’s With Dogs at the Edge of Life explores the troubling contradictions in the human-canine relationship.

February 29, 2016 We all hold something sacred, even if it’s only the right to hold nothing sacred. In Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, David Dark sets out to wring some deeper truth from this facile notion and find possibilities for connection hidden within the very beliefs that appear to divide us. Dark will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 4, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

February 22, 2016 In A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernandez explores the pain and contradictions of growing up in an immigrant family. Hernandez will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on February 25, 2016, at 7 p.m.

February 1, 2016 Mary Karr, one of the contemporary masters of memoir, is a true believer in the transformative power of the form. In The Art of Memoir, she offers a short course in the joys and challenges of writing the story of your own life. She will appear in discussion with songwriter Rodney Crowell at the Green Door Gourmet in Nashville on February 6, 2016. The event is a benefit for The Porch Writers’ Collective.