Lisa Alther’s Swan Song sends its grief-stricken 60-something heroine on a cruise
Swan Song: An Odyssey, the eighth novel by Kingsport native Lisa Alther, is a witty meditation on loss and longing in late-middle age.
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Jessica Pearce Rotondi explores her family’s grief in What We Inherit
The journalist Jessica Pearce Rotondi was 8 years old before she heard her mother speak the name of her uncle, Jack Pearce, who vanished when his plane was shot down over Laos in March 1972. In her propulsive memoir, What We Inherit, Rotondi probes her family’s agonized search for truth across three generations.
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Book Excerpt: Greetings from New Nashville
Greetings from New Nashville, an essay collection edited by Steve Haruch, will be published in October 2020. Contributors include Ann Patchett, Ben Folds, and Tiana Clark. Haruch is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the Nashville Scene, The New York Times, NPR’s Code Switch, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is currently producing a documentary film about the history of college radio.
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Wayétu Moore flees from Liberia’s civil war and fights to be seen in race-obsessed America
In Wayétu Moore’s memoir, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, Moore details her flight from Liberia’s civil war, her disorientation in an America obsessed with skin color, and her search for the warrior-woman who helped her family escape.
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Say Nothing weaves the unsolved case of a disappeared Belfast mother into a history of the Troubles
In Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe masterfully combines the unsolved mystery of a kidnapped Belfast woman, the story of a secret oral history archive in Boston, and a richly reported history of the Troubles. A free online public masterclass on the book will be led by University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor Monica Black on June 10 at 7 p.m. EDT.
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Book Excerpt: The Headless Angel
Bill Brown is the author of 12 poetry collections. During the past 30 years, he has published hundreds of poems and articles in literary journals and anthologies. In 2011 the Tennessee Writers Alliance named him Tennessee Writer of the Year. He lives in Greenbrier.
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