Ed Tarkington

June 22, 2010 When Alice Pepin is found dead of anaphylactic shock, the result of a catastrophic peanut allergy, it’s not clear why she ever sat down in front of a plate of peanuts in the first place, or why all the EpiPens in the apartment are missing. Why did Alice die? Did she commit suicide? Or was she murdered—by her husband, or, even more incredibly, by marriage itself? This unconventional premise is only one reason that Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut—a dark examination of sex, marriage, and murder—is already this year’s most talked-about fiction debut, though it hits stores for the first time today. Ross will discuss Mr. Peanut at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville tonight at 7 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on June 24 at 6 p.m.

May 6, 2010 Tim Johnston’s Irish Girl, winner of the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, juxtaposes random incidents of violence and loss with moving portraits of repressed longing and regret. Written in elegiac, lyrical prose, these stories suggest that the past always weighs heavily on the present, and that, sooner or later, we will all be made to pay for our sins—or our innocence. Tim Johnston will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on May 6 at 7 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on May 7 at 1 p.m.

April 20, 2010 Since Jay McInerney’s emergence as part of the 1980s literary brat-pack, his work has read much like a series of letters from a cultured but slightly deviant friend: the type of person who runs with the too-fast/too-rich set, frequents the hot clubs, and gets invited to all of those parties we imagine as unspeakably glamorous but which are actually full of hopeless vanity. And yet, like our insider friend—whom we both pity and envy; whom we love but aren’t sure we particularly like—we still find ourselves fascinated by these people and their stories. We want to be invited to their parties, even if we don’t really want to attend them, and we’re grateful to have a reliable correspondent to document every excess.

Brad Watson‘s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, returns to the post-Faulkner, post-modern South of bleak strip malls, cheap motels, tacky Gulf Coast beaches, and lonely outposts surrounded by murky water, the faint odor of decay, and the ever-present specters of longing and loss. But despite the well-known milieu, these new stories demonstrate a mastery of the surreal that lifts them above the typical conventions of Southern Gothic. Brad Watson will be at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 30.