Folklorist Joe Wilson reflects on music, history, and life
Roots Music in America and Lucky Joe’s Namesake, two new volumes from the University of Tennessee Press, collect the late folklorist Joe Wilson’s idiosyncratic writings on music, history, and life.
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Daniel Wallace returns with a comic romp through a series of Extraordinary Adventures
Best known for his debut novel, Big Fish, Daniel Wallace is a master of wit and whimsy, gleaning both wonder and absurdity from the commonplace. In Extraordinary Adventures, Wallace delivers a modern variation on the picaresque, replete with madcap hijinks. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 7 at 6:30 p.m.
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John T. Edge makes a case for food as the Rosetta Stone of Southern history
A cast of visionaries and eccentrics populates The Potlikker Papers, from Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Freedom Farm and Pig Bank, to Edna Lewis, who could tell when a cake was done by listening to it.
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Madison Smartt Bell takes the reader on a visionary journey in Behind the Moon
In Behind the Moon, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers on a complex, hallucinatory tour of human and animal consciousness in the course of a story about a mother’s search for her lost daughter.
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Holly Tucker talks with Chapter 16 about her new nonfiction book about historical intrigue in Paris
Holly Tucker’s City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris tells a fascinating true tale of murder, torture, and intrigue in seventeenth-century Paris—and explains how the City of Light got a nickname that has persisted for centuries. Tucker will discuss the book at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on June 8 on 4 p.m.
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