Tina Chambers

August 15, 2014 The locals call it “Spite House,” the structure at the center of Courtney Miller Santo’s new novel, Three Story House. Lizzie Linwood, granddaughter of the man who built the Memphis home to “spite” his brother, joins forces with her two cousins to renovate the dilapidated structure, exposing old wounds and revealing buried truths along the way. Courtney Miller Santo will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on August 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.

March 26, 2013 Hilarious and heartbreaking, poignant and absurd, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the Nashville Reads book selection for 2014. The novel asks readers to consider the ways in which all creatures are connected and responsible to one another. Fowler answered questions from Chapter 16 in advance of her appearance at the Nashville Public Library on April 1, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

February 26, 2014 Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the 2014 Nashville Reads book selection, is interested in memory and language and story, perhaps because Rosemary has been struggling with the story of her own life since she was five years old, when her unusual sister Fern disappeared, inflicting a trauma so deep that neither Rosemary nor her family has ever fully recovered. The Nashville Reads Kickoff event, “Drop Everything and Read,” will be held March 3, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library at 2 p.m. Guest readers include Mayor Karl Dean, novelist Ann Patchett, and songwriter Janis Ian, among others. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.

February 19, 2014 A delight from beginning to end, Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now is filled with unlikely characters whose pain and longing are so real that readers celebrate each small step they take toward something like wholeness. As Quick’s protagonist, Bartholomew Neil, says, “Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t. And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?” Matthew Quick will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

January 8, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling 2004 novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is set against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil-rights movement. In The Invention of Wings Kidd turns the clock back further—to the slave-holding South prior to the Civil War. Kidd will discuss the book at 6:15 p.m. on January 15, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.