Pandemic cleaning yields a gift
Barely daring to breathe, I brought the box downstairs. I unsealed it and clicked open the dusty case. And there was the Remington, gleaming like the day Cousin Minnie had presented it to me.
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Book Excerpt: Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning won the 2019 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Cawood is the author of the memoir The Going and Goodbye, the inspirational little book 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17, and the short story collection A Small Thing to Want. She lives in Johnson City. She’ll appear with Ciona Rouse and Larry Thacker at a virtual event hosted by East Tennessee State University on March 3.
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Singled Out recounts the athletic feats and personal tragedies of baseball’s Glenn Burke
In Singled Out, Andrew Maraniss charts the phenomenal rise and terrible fall of Glenn Burke, a gifted athlete who struggled to conceal his sexuality at a time when there was no place for a gay man in the game of baseball. Maraniss will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 2.
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Larry D. Thacker’s fictional Labor County brims with the weird and wondrous
Larry D. Thacker’s short story collection Working It Off in Labor County creates a small world where wild-hair notions are the norm and the odd miracle is not out of the question. Thacker will appear with Shuly Xóchitl Cawood and Ciona Rouse at a virtual event hosted by East Tennessee State University on March 3.
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Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming is an elegy and a call to action
Michael Eric Dyson’s Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America focuses on life, breath, and death, particularly regarding Black bodies. Dyson beatifies the slain and enjoins those newly “woke” to approach social justice work with humility.
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Humor and peril collide in The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus
The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus corrals nine ambitious, verbally rich narrative worlds. Through humor or gut-punching drama, these stories showcase Gurganus’ penchant for lifting the veneer of small-town niceties, exposing the vast terrain of his characters’ interior lives.
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