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.
Read more
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.
Read more
Kim Trevathan revisits the Tennessee River from a new direction
In Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, Maryville College professor and nature writer Kim Trevathan travels the length of the waterway a second time to discover “how the river had changed in twenty years, and how the passing of two decades had changed me.” Trevathan will discuss Against the Current at a virtual event hosted by Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 25.
Read more
My Year Abroad traces an ordinary young man’s journey to a weird hell and back
My Year Abroad, Chang-rae Lee’s sixth novel, is an exuberant — and strange — coming-of-age tale. Lee will discuss the book with Ann Patchett at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 19.
Read more
Southern Word connects young people to their voices, each other
Students and recent alumni of Southern Word have published books, produced music, given TEDx Talks, been featured on national broadcasts and in newspapers like The New York Times, and even received invitations from Michelle Obama to visit the White House for a student poetry celebration. Southern Word will host the annual BlackLift Poetry House, held online February 20.
Read more
Book Excerpt: Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story
Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story recounts the story of hot chicken and what the dish’s growing popularity reveals about race relations in a changing city. Hot, Hot Chicken will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in March 2021.
Read more
