Ed Tarkington

April 14, 2014 Just as Jim and Franny Post prepare to embark on a two-week jaunt to Mallorca—a final family trip before their youngest child leaves for college—their perfect life falls apart. Emma Straub will discuss The Vacationers on April 17, 2014, at 7 p.m. in Buttrick Hall, Room 102, on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville. The event is free and open to the public.

January 30, 2014 “Elspeth Howell was a sinner.” Thus begins James Scott’s harrowing debut novel, The Kept, in which Elspeth is made to pay a hefty price for her sins: after a long foot journey through snow, she returns home to find her husband and four of her five children murdered. Rendered in delicate, measured prose that makes the unfolding of weighty truths and painful discoveries all the more resonant, The Kept is a provocative hybrid of period suspense thriller and domestic literary novel. James Scott will appear in conversation with Jamie Quatro at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 3, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

October 15, 2013 More than twenty years have passed since the publication of The Secret History, the extraordinary international-bestselling novel that established Donna Tartt as a literary legend at age twenty-eight, and more than a decade since her most recent, the equally acclaimed The Little Friend. Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch—a coming-of-age tale that gradually evolves into a pulse-quickening thriller—is well worth the wait. Tartt will appear at the Nashville Public Library on October 22, 2013, at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@6:15 series. The event is free and open to the public.