Sean Kinch

November 14, 2013 Jonathan Miles’s second novel, Want Not, follows a middle-aged linguistics professor, a pair of Dumpster-diving “freegans,” and a suburban housewife, all living in greater New York City, as they come to terms with the refuse of their lives. It’s a droll and affecting tale that disguises its philosophical message beneath a comic veneer. Miles will read from Want Not at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 16, 2013, at 4 p.m.

September 3, 2013 Daniel Woodrell’s characters live in a dangerous world. In Woodrell’s new novel, The Maid’s Version, scenes of casual cruelty follow passages of sexual abuse and bloody bar fights. Woodrell will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013. All festival events are free and open to the public.

June 19, 2013 Philipp Meyer’s novel The Son ranges across Texas history from the years of the Republic to the oil boom of the 1980s, from the Comanches of the West to the Mexican ranches in the South, portraying a state steeped in violence and injustice. Focused on three generations of a single family, the novel punctures myths of the independent cowboy and the virtuous Native American, but it also provides a nostalgic view of a beautiful land all-too-quickly destroyed by commercial exploitation. Meyer will discuss The Son at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 25 at 6:30 p.m.

May 15, 2013 Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena puts a human face on the dehumanizing forces of war, revealing the ways in which the lives of people in a small mountain village in Chechnya are overturned by fifteen years of conflict with the Russian Federation. Memorials to the disappeared are a form of defiance, and even a single life spared from obliteration feels like a moral victory. Anthony Marra will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 2 p.m. on May 18, 2013.