Michael Ray Taylor

October 7, 2011 As Bernard Malamud and W.P. Kinsella did before him, in The Art of Fielding Chad Harbach has reinvented baseball within a universe of his own creation, a place that is not quite the world as we know it, but a world as it might exist within the infinite lines stretching outward from home through first and third base. Harbach will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

August 12, 2011 At barely 200 pages, The Night Train is Clyde Edgerton’s shortest book, and yet in its simple story of two musically inclined teenagers, one white and one black, it may surpass Walking Across Egypt and The Bible Salesman as his best. Edgerton will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

June 20, 2011 In The Ranger, veteran crime writer Ace Atkins brings disturbingly to life a Mississippi that is a gothic green hell of ignorance and corruption. Set in fictional Tibbehah County (think Yoknapatawpha thrust into the twenty-first century), the novel introduces Quinn Colson, on leave from yet another combat tour in Afghanistan to bury his uncle, the county sheriff. What Colson finds at home just ain’t right, and he intends to set things straight. Ace Atkins will read from The Ranger on June 21 at 6 p.m. at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.