Fueled by empathy, precision, and wit, Lee Smith’s fiction opens up the interior worlds of characters whose depths we might least expect, given the everyday circumstances of their Southern lives. Smith spoke with Chapter 16 about her lifelong pursuit of stories that thrive on healthy doses of surprise, conflict, and mischief.
Beatriz Williams’s The Summer Wives follows a young woman’s long entanglement with an insular island community and its coded world of secrets, gossip, and cross-cultural tensions. Williams will discuss The Summer Wives at Novel in Memphis on July 15.
In Silas House’s Southernmost, Asher Sharp’s evolving beliefs have estranged him from his congregation, but he pins his hopes on his young son.
Throughout Specter Mountain, Jesse Graves and William Wright’s collaborative poetry collection, the mountain landscape itself emerges as a powerful, haunting source of revelation. The result is a unique contribution to Appalachian literature.
When a recent college graduate goes to work for Faith Frank, a feminist legend, she undergoes an initiation into her mentor’s world-and her own conscience. Meg Wolitzer will discuss The Female Persuasion at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 19.
In The Fighter, Michael Farris Smith’s latest tale of human struggle in the Mississippi Delta, brawler Jack Boucher is drowning in debt, dodging enemies, and losing the battle against his own fractured memory. Smith will appear at Novel in Memphis on April 16, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17.
