A woman considers her troubled childhood in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton
January 19, 2016 In My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout takes readers into the mind and heart of a woman who has survived a troubled childhood, revealing a spirit that is both beautiful and deeply wounded. Strout will appear at the Nashville Public Library on January 21, 2016.
Christmas memories can be complicated
December 18, 2015 The Brownings excelled at Christmas excess, and no one enjoyed it more than I did. Becoming an adult took most of the shine off the holiday for me. There is not much wonder in shopping and cooking and managing contentious relatives. But there was a time when Christmas wonder returned….
Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot discuss art, sex, war, and other things in About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter
December 7, 2015 About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter by Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot is a lively dialogue between longtime friends about family, war, sex, fashion, food, and any number of other subjects. The conversation meanders through the history of the twentieth century, exploring the way culture and circumstance shaped the lives and work of two brilliant, unconventional women.
In Sarah Einstein’s Mot: A Memoir, a woman in search of herself befriends a tormented wanderer
November 17, 2015 Sarah Einstein’s Mot: A Memoir tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a woman trying to find some purpose in her troubled life and a chronically homeless man who struggles with an army of inner demons.
The stories in Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking explore the inescapable nature of risk
October 26, 2015 In Colum McCann’s latest story collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking, characters fall prey to unforeseen or unknowable threats, and their efforts to make the world safe and comprehensible fail. McCann will discuss the book at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library in Knoxville on November 2, 2015, at 7 p.m.
Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last ponders just how much security is worth
October 12, 2015 Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last takes the very real ills and absurdities of the early twenty-first century—economic recession, for-profit prisons, gated communities, loss of privacy, technology-fueled narcissism, etc.—and gives them the signature Atwood tweak into the realm of speculative fiction. The issues it takes on are serious, but the story itself is a sexy, bitterly comic romp. Atwood will discuss The Heart Goes Last at the Nashville Public Library on October 19, 2015, at 6:15 p.m.
