June 16, 2016 In Julia Franks’s Over the Plain Houses, set in western North Carolina farm country in 1939, a married woman begins to fill the witching hours of night by roaming the wild hills surrounding her farm. Her husband, an evangelical preacher, becomes convinced that his once-pious wife has repudiated God. Franks will discuss Over the Plain Houses at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 23, 2016, at 6 p.m.
May 9, 2016 With Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh joins the grand American tradition of the social-protest novel. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck before her, she wields a quixotic sword against corporate corruption and malfeasance—in this case, fracking. Haigh will read from Heat and Light at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 12, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
April 8, 2016 The premise of Julia Claiborne Johnson’s debut novel, Be Frank With Me, sounds like a winning Hollywood pitch: a reclusive author who’s published nothing since achieving phenomenal success decades earlier is forced to write again when she loses her fortune to a Madoff-style swindler.
March 21, 2016 Reading Julian Barnes is a paradoxical pleasure: the author makes clear, in book after book, that literature provides no reassurances, no uncanny access to wisdom or happiness, no affirmation to troubled readers—and yet the experience of reading his work is strangely comforting. Now seventy, Barnes keeps exploring profound questions and continues to produce brilliantly conflicting answers. He will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Hall in Nashville on March 23, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
February 16, 2016 Ariel Lawhon’s new novel, Flight of Dreams, is a historical mystery that imagines the real cause of the Hindenburg’s explosion. While private drama occupies the foreground of Lawhon’s story, the specter of Hitler is never far from the characters’ minds. Lawhon will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
January 25, 2016 Janice Y. K. Lee’s new novel, The Expatriates, depicts the intersecting lives of three women in Hong Kong. When their world of privilege is thrown into disarray, they learn how to overcome trauma and rebuild their lives. Janice Y. K. Lee will read from The Expatriates at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
