James Seay’s essay collection reflects on mortality, literature, and the natural world
James Seay takes readers to Mississippi, Moscow, and many places in between in his latest book, a reflective and tender essay collection titled Come! Come! Where? Where?
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Michael Sims remembers the bookstore where he found the world
I loved opening the bookstore alone on Sunday. I loved how it smelled — all those books with their genie-in-a-bottle dreams of love and fear, goddesses and coal miners — Sherlock Holmes on the foggy moor — barefoot Sappho — Harriet Tubman, vampires, Lassie. Often I would arrive well before noon, to have some time alone with the books.
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A lyrical, atmospheric new picture book celebrates author and environmentalist Wilma Dykeman
In her new picture book, Of Words and Water, Shannon Hitchcock tells the story of underappreciated Appalachian author and environmentalist Wilma Dykeman.
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Frye Gaillard delivers a sprawling, panoramic history of the 1960s
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Frye Gaillard’s A Hard Rain pulls the reader into the 1960s, not just to witness its momentous events, but to feel its idealism and disenchantment. First published in 2018, A Hard Rain has recently been released in paperback and as an audiobook.
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Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You alternates between the #MeToo present and a 1990s mystery
In Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, a popular LA podcaster returns to her New England boarding school to investigate a murder that still haunts the campus. Makkai will discuss her work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on April 18.
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Hampton Sides examines the final voyage of one of the great explorers
In The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, Hampton Sides brings to life all the excitement, drudgery, politics, and cultural complications of one of the greatest, and most tragic, voyages of discovery. Sides will discuss the book in events at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17 and at Novel in Memphis on April 18.
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