He Weren’t Going to Go Down Quiet
August 19, 2013 James McBride earned universal praise and worldwide recognition for The Color of Water, his classic memoir of growing up black with a white mother in 1960s New York. His subsequent books—including Miracle at St. Anna, a novel adapted into the 2008 film by Spike Lee—have grappled with the problem of race and the legacy of slavery. In The Good Lord Bird, McBride returns to these themes but with a starkly different approach. He will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. All festival events are free and open to the public.
August 14, 2013 As a young English professor in the late 1960s, author and literary critic Gerald Duff held appointments at both Vanderbilt and Kenyon, where he came into frequent close contact with the major poets and critics of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. In Fugitive Days, Duff shares both comic and poignant tales of his encounters with Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson. He also examines the impact of the Fugitives’ poetry, the New Criticism, and the controversial Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, on the American literary landscape.
August 1, 2013 Steve Yarbrough has earned a devoted readership for evocative, emotionally searing stories and novels about his native Mississippi. With The Realm of Last Chances, he turns to his adopted home state of Massachusetts, delivering a strikingly sensitive portrait of Kristin and Cal, an unlikely couple forced by the recession to move cross-country, and Matt, a young interloper whose own thwarted circumstances kindle a spiritual kinship with Kristin that becomes to each of them as necessary as it is doomed. Yarbrough will appear at 
July 18, 2013 Bobbie Ann Mason’s most recent novel is simultaneously a tale of adapting to old age, a charming romance, a food-and-wine tour of Paris and Provence, and a spellbinding World War II suspense thriller. The Girl in the Blue Beret is a richly satisfying page turner and an artful literary novel worthy of a wide audience and a prominent place in its acclaimed author’s award-winning body of work. Mason will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
May 16, 2013 “The past keeps happening to us,” writes Bill Cheng in his debut novel, Southern Cross the Dog. “No matter who we are or how far we get away, it keeps happening to us.” These words are potent, both for their echo of Faulkner’s famous dictum (“The past is never dead”) and for the fact that their author is a Chinese-American New Yorker. Despite having never set foot in Mississippi, Cheng has staked a formidable claim in the heart of Faulkner Country. Cheng will appear at 
