Chapter 16 - Part 27

A River’s Tale

Patti Callahan Henry tells a story of two sisters and the power of fairy tales

By Abby N. Lewis | March 28, 2024

Operation Pied Piper, initiated by the British government in September 1939, relocated thousands of children in an effort to protect them from war bombing. In Patti Callahan Henry’s novel The Secret Book of Flora Lea, young sisters Hazel and Flora find themselves displaced with so many others, thrust into a terrifying adventure. Henry will appear at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on April 2.

“Ars Poetica”

Book Excerpt: Gatherer

By Todd Osborne | March 27, 2024

Gatherer, forthcoming from Belle Point Press, is the debut collection by Todd Osborne, a poet and teacher from Nashville. Osborne’s poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review.

Looking at Everything

Ross Gay reprises his practice of everyday delight

By Beth Waltemath | March 26, 2024

Poet Ross Gay returns to finding joy in the everyday with his latest essay collection, The Book of (More) Delights. Gay will appear at a fundraiser for The Porch in Nashville on April 5 and will give a free reading at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library on April 6.

All in the Unsaid

A look back on Charles Wright’s influential poetry collection Black Zodiac

By Erica Wright | March 25, 2024

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Black Zodiac, Charles Wright pursues timeless questions of aging and mortality.

Black Futures Forever

Two books of Afrofuturist fiction envision Black possibility and protest

By Kashif Andrew Graham | March 22, 2024

Black Panther: Panther’s Rage by Sheree Renée Thomas and the anthology Africa Risen, which Thomas coedited, imagine worlds rich in Black life and agency. Sheree Renée Thomas will appear at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City on March 27.

A Living Pulse

Past and present mingle in collections by Loving, Shockley, and Underwood

By Emily Choate | March 21, 2024

In their recently published collections, poets Denton Loving, Evie Shockley, and Susan O’Dell Underwood each find an original expression for the mingling of past and present that presses at the edges of contemporary life. Susan O’Dell Underwood and Denton Loving will appear at the 2024 Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference in Oak Ridge, April 4-6

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning