Still Alive
Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd gathers two decades of the critically acclaimed novelist’s personal narratives and critical writing. Kushner will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
A Great Southern Voice
The name Rick Bragg is a kind of fixture of the South, likely familiar even to those who’ve never read a word of his prose. If that’s the case for you, a new collection of his short works, Where I Come From, is as good a place to start as any.
The Past Rising Up
In Randall Kenan’s new story collection, If I Had Two Wings, the residents of Tims Creek, North Carolina, often find themselves in bewildering circumstances, caught up in twists of fate that demand an unrehearsed response.
A Sexy, Impressionistic Feast
Leesa Cross-Smith’s new book of short fiction, So We Can Glow, feels like a radical act of joy. On the whole, the collection is a sexy, impressionistic feast of feminine energy and agency.
The Gift of the Magis
I knew what it was instantly. Even shrouded beneath a bedsheet, the shape was undisguisable.
Teaching and Unteaching—and Entertaining All the Way
As she was coming of age in Nashville in the 1950s, there were many places award-winning children’s author Patricia McKissack was not allowed to go. She remembers hotels and restaurants that forbade African Americans entry, and movie theaters with a separate doorway in the alley for black patrons. The farthest reaches of the Grand Ole Opry’s balcony, known as the buzzard’s roost, was the only seating open to African Americans, McKissack recalls. She never partook: “My grandfather said that watermelons would bloom in January if any of his children went down there. ‘We don’t sit in no buzzard’s roost,’ he said. ‘We’re human beings, not buzzards.'”
