Tina Chambers

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.

December 12, 2013 Novelist Katherine Paterson is married to a Presbyterian minister, and during each Christmas Eve service it has been his custom to read aloud an inspirational story written for the occasion by his wife, the author of Bridge to Terabithia. Many of these stories have now been collected in a new volume titled A Stubborn Sweetness and Other Stories for the Christmas Season.

December 10, 2013 Frank Joyner feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. Natural-gas drilling, known as “hydrofracturing,” has come to his town, and many of his neighbors have already made deals to allow drilling on their land. Now Frank feels responsible for holding off the collapse of his community. In Fractures, UT grad Lamar Herrin plumbs the fissures of both family and land.