Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

It’s All Gone Now

Richard Bausch delineates the complexity of the human heart

Long considered one of American literature’s most accomplished writers of short fiction, Richard Bausch returns with a collection of misbegotten protagonists navigating the travails of the modern malaise.

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Pickin’ and Killin’ in Music City

Peggy O’Neal Peden’s home-grown thriller is a winner

Campbell Hale is not in the music business, but her interest in a country legend may get her killed anyway. Peggy O’Neal Peden will read from her debut mystery, Your Killin’ Heart, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 7 at 2 p.m.

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What is Love Without Longing?

Sheba Karim’s meditation on desire and distance embraces and enlarges the YA genre

It’s the summer after high school, and Shabnam Qureshi has a simple plan: “Get through the summer. Get to Penn. Begin anew. Don’t look back.” But as Sheba Karim demonstrates in That Thing We Call a Heart, her second book for young adults, life is rarely so simple. Karim will appear on May 9 at 2 p.m. at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

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“Don’t Hang Up”

Book Excerpt: Morning Window

Bill Brown is the author of nine poetry collections and a textbook. His work has appeared in Potomac Review, Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, and River Styx, among others.

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God’s Gonna Trouble the Water

In Midnight Without a Moon, Linda Williams Jackson considers the civil-rights movement through the eyes of a feisty teenage girl

Thirteen-year-old Rose Lee Carter knows that the Jim Crow South has to change, but she’s not sure she wants to be the one to do it. Linda Williams Jackson makes a stunning debut with her middle-grade historical novel, Midnight Without a Moon.

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Fear, Fury, Hope, Love

For two teenagers, a same-sex love affair plays out against a backdrop of family grief

In How to Make a Wish, Nashville YA author Ashley Herring Blake deftly describes the highs and lows of a burgeoning love affair between two young women dealing with personal problems that would challenge adults of any age. Blake will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 2 at 6:30 p.m.

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