A gripping story set in the waning days of the Italian Renaissance
In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell spins a tale that flows like quicksilver beneath heavy gowns and gilt pageantry. O’Farrell will appear in conversation with Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 12.
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Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann
In her vibrant new novel, Dear Ann, Bobbie Ann Mason imagines the life that might have been for Ann Workman, a graduate student who pursues love and English literature against the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s. Bobbie Ann Mason will appear at the online 2021 Southern Festival of Books on October 9.
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Kristen Radtke’s Seek You considers our solitary era
Kristen Radtke’s Seek You explores the pain and pleasure of solitude in a time of isolation. Radtke will appear at the online 2021 Southern Festival of Books.
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Motherhood is the beating heart of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet follows the brief life of William Shakespeare’s son and offers a backstory for his wife, Agnes, as woman, mother, and muse. O’Farrell will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 22.
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Reading in a plague year
On New Year’s Day 2020, 24 hours after an initial cluster of COVID-19 cases had been diagnosed in Wuhan, China, I was nose-deep in The Mirror & the Light, the magnificent doorstop conclusion to Dame Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, soaking up the pageantry and intrigue of Henry VIII’s court. Mantel cast a spell, and I was blissfully unaware of reports radiating outward from East Asia and then from Italy. Doomscrolling was future tense.
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M. Randal O’Wain’s stories limn the South’s inequities and anguished history
In his story collection Hallelujah Station, Memphis native M. Randal O’Wain explores lives we’ve pushed to the margins. There’s suffering aplenty, but there are also dashes of art — poets, Dutch Masters, David Lynch — to leaven the pain.
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