Ace Atkins discusses The Redeemers, his fifth novel featuring Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson
July 16, 2015 The Redeemers is Ace Atkin’s fifth novel in a suspense series featuring Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson, a truly Southern action hero who seems destined to build a following similar to John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers or C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett. Atkins will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 26, 2015, at 4 p.m.
Novelist Matthew Quick talks with Chapter 16 about teachers, humor, Hollywood, and his new book, Love May Fail
June 16, 2015 In Matthew Quick’s Love May Fail, the sixth novel from the author of The Silver Linings Playbook, a woman leaves a failed marriage in Florida to return to her South Jersey roots, where she discovers how a high school teacher played a profound role in shaping her life. Quick will discuss Love May Fail at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 19, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
Margaret Lazarus Dean bids a nuanced farewell to American spaceflight
May 14, 2015 In 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean drove repeatedly from her home in Knoxville to Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch the final launches of the three surviving craft in the American space-shuttle fleet. In Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight, she recounts these trips and reflects eloquently on what it means to have lost the ability to launch humans into space from U.S. soil. Dean will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 18, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
Robert Gipe’s illustrated debut novel, Trampoline, introduces a troubled teen coming of age during an Appalachian coal war
April 7, 2015 It’s been a while since anyone produced a great American coming-of-age-novel, but Kingsport native Robert Gipe hits the mark with Trampoline, an inventive debut set in the coal country of Eastern Kentucky. Narrator Dawn Jewell, fifteen, is as smart as Scout Finch, more profane than Holden Caulfield, and as tough in a fight as Mattie Ross. Gipe tells her story not only in flawless prose but also with 220 comics-style drawings that keep the book grounded in the world of an Appalachian teenager.
The graphic trilogy March, Congressman John Lewis’s memoir of the American civil-rights movement, continues with a focus on Nashville’s Freedom Riders
March 19, 2015 Impressive artwork by Nate Powell, a gripping story by Andrew Aydin, and an eyewitness view of history from U.S. Representative John Lewis combine flawlessly in March: Book Two, the second volume of Lewis’s graphic memoir of the American civil-rights movement. This installment highlights Lewis’s Nashville-based efforts to launch Freedom Riders onto segregated bus lines throughout the South.
Jamie Kornegay’s Soil introduces a Faulknerian character stuck in a world of Internet conspiracies and noisy four-wheelers
March 10, 2015 What would happen if the grandson of a Snopes studied sustainable agriculture and Internet-fueled apocalypse scenarios? Nothing good, as Jamie Kornegay suggests in Soil, his beautifully written debut novel. Kornegay will read at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 17, 2015, and at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on March 18, 2015. Both events will take place at 6:30 p.m.
