In Alice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, a terminally ill columnist, club impresario, and dance school founder dictates tender hagiographies of the Black creatives who built and nurtured a thriving community in mid-20th-century Detroit. Randall will take part in the presentation of the 2021 John Egerton Prize, awarded by the Southern Foodways Alliance at an online session of the 2021 Southern Festival of Books on October 7.
From the Chapter 16 archive: If there’s not enough time to read, why am I working so hard to send another book into the world?
I’ll Take You There, edited by Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr. and written by more than 100 local contributors, guides readers to Nashville places shaped by resistance to power and injustice.
In Rachel Louise Martin’s Hot, Hot Chicken, the story of a beloved Nashville dish is inextricable from the history of redlining and misguided urban renewal initiatives that undermined the city’s Black communities for generations. Martin will appear at a virtual event hosted by The Bookshop in Nashville on April 5.
My Year Abroad, Chang-rae Lee’s sixth novel, is an exuberant — and strange — coming-of-age tale. Lee will discuss the book with Ann Patchett at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 19.
Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie tells the story of the free-spirited life and revolutionary times of the famously secretive Harriet the Spy author, Louise Fitzhugh.
