March 4, 2015 The new novel by Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, tells the story of a Manhattan dentist, Paul O’Rourke, whose practice is in perfect working order but whose personal life is an unqualified mess. Ferris will appear at Salon@615 at 6:15 p.m. at the Nashville Public Library on March 10, 2015. The salon is a free, ticketed event.
February 24, 2015 Jacob McNeely, the eighteen-year-old hero of David Joy’s Where All Light Tends to Go, dreams of starting a new life somewhere else but feels stuck in his piddling Appalachian home town, doomed to follow the path of his meth-dealing father. David Joy will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on March 3, 2015, at 6:30 pm.; at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 1, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.; and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 2, 2015, at 2 p.m.
February 5, 2015 In See How Small, Scott Blackwood uses the 1991 yogurt-shop murders in Austin as the inspiration for a novel that expresses the ineradicable damage tragedy inflicts on survivors. Blackwood will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 12, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
January 20, 2015 Jonathan Miles has a gift for transforming life’s base materials into literary gold. His novels, Dear American Airlines (2008) and Want Not (2013), address dark, potentially dispiriting themes with a deft, comedic touch. Miles will give a free public reading at the University of Tennessee’s John C. Hodges Library in Knoxville on January 26, 2015, at 7 p.m.
January 6, 2015 Christopher Scotton’s debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, is both contemporary and old-fashioned, addressing present-day issues in a novelistic form that harks back to the nineteenth century. Scotton will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 13, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
November 19, 2014 The stories in The Last Bizarre Tale, a new collection by Knoxville native David Madden, exhibit the protean nature of Madden’s gifts: his masterful tales run the gamut of literary styles and genres, each entry marked with the stamp of its author’s ingenuity. Madden will appear at Knox Heritage in Knoxville on November 21, 2014, at 11:30 a.m.
