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.

November 19, 2012 Barbara Kingsolver’s epic 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, offers a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the meaning of family. At its core, her new novel asks another fundamental question: “Where will we go from here?” On November 27, Barbara Kingsolver will discuss Flight Behavior at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. The event begins at 6:15 p.m.; doors open at 5:45.

October 2, 2012 Louise Erdrich does not fit into any pigeonhole. Her career, spanning three decades and twenty-six books, may once have belonged in the category of the “Native American renaissance” of the late-twentieth century, but that classification is now too restrictive. Her work, which still typically depicts Indians of the American Midwest, reaches toward the universal even as it remains rooted in the particulars of the lives of the Indians who were driven from traditional lands and into the dubious safety of reservations. On October 9 at 6:15 p.m., Louise Erdrich will discuss The Round House at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

October 6, 2010 Laura Lippman’s new crime novel, I’d Know You Anywhere, begins where most mysteries end. The killer has been caught and incarcerated; apparently, justice has been served. Twenty years after he raped and murdered a series of young women in suburban Washington, D.C., Walter Bowman sits on Death Row awaiting execution, his appeals finally exhausted. His last request is to make contact with the one girl he kidnapped but, unlike the unfortunate others, did not kill. Lippman will read from the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 7 at 6 p.m.