August 28, 2013 The short stories in Cary Holladay’s The Deer in the Mirror may be set mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there is nothing staid or dated about them. Holladay will discuss the collection at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on September 5, 2013, at 5:30 p.m., and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13. Both events are free and open to the public.
July 19, 2013 The annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference will kick off its distinguished lineup of readings on July 23, 2013, with National Book Award winner and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Alice McDermott. During its twenty-four-year stretch of summer conferences, Sewanee has become woven into the fabric of Tennessee’s literary tradition, bringing highly regarded authors together with emerging writers for twelve days of readings, lectures, panel discussions, and intensive workshops.
July 8, 2013 Wisp of a Thing is Alex Bledsoe’s second fantasy novel about the Tufa, a secretive people bent on protecting the ancient mysteries of their Smoky Mountain community. When an outsider comes in search of a powerful Tufa song, the myths and histories hidden in Cloud County awaken, putting every Tufa tradition to the test. Bledsoe will read from Wisp of a Thing at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 13, 2013, at 2 p.m. and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 14 at 2 p.m.
January 23, 2013 The Oxford American’s new editor-in-chief, Roger D. Hodge, talks with Chapter 16 about his view of editing as a “conversational” process. The point of the conversation, he says, is to serve the stories themselves: “When everything comes together in just the right way, so that the stories are winking and glancing across the issue at one another, something magical happens. You have a self-contained whole, a world within the world.”
January 11, 2013 Patricia Cornwell has made the media rounds in recent months, celebrating the publication of The Bone Bed, the twentieth entry in her series of bestselling crime thrillers featuring Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist. The Scarpetta novels, for which Cornwell has frequently done research at the Body Farm and National Forensic Academy at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, sparked the forensic science subgenre of thrillers that now crowds television schedules with shows like C.S.I. Investigation.
December 20, 2012 Another documentary about Damien Echols is set to open on Christmas Day: West of Memphis, which producer Peter Jackson has called “the most important film” he’s ever made. Meanwhile, Echols is still fighting for full exoneration, both for himself and for the other men convicted with him. This struggle for understanding is evident in the excruciating detail with which Echols writes about his time on death row. His emphasis on the torturous aspects of his experience (in both prison life and the poverty-wracked Southern childhood preceding it) is the aspect of the book that critics have most often highlighted in their reviews.
