July 1, 2011 The sign isn’t up yet, and the news was grim for a long time, so it’s perhaps understandable that Ashley Dacus, public-relations and events coordinator at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, keeps getting asked when Davis-Kidd Booksellers will close. In fact, it isn’t closing; it’s growing. According to a feature in this week’s Memphis Flyer, owner Neil Van Uum has big plans for the new/old store:
June 22, 2011 Ann Patchett first made bestseller lists with her transcendent 2001 novel, Bel Canto, the story of an international group of businessmen, diplomats, and politicians—and one opera diva—who are held hostage by terrorists in the vice-presidential palace of an unnamed Latin American country. In State of Wonder, Patchett returns to the jungle, this time to the central Amazon basin, a vast but impenetrable landscape where the air “is heavy enough to be bitten and chewed,” and insects fly “with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses” of human beings. There’s a magnificent chapter set in an opera house and the kind of chaotic market scene that’s more or less required of a novel set in an equatorial country, but the real point of this book is to get its protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, out of suburbia, away from her phone, and into “the beating heart of nowhere”—a jungle teeming with spiders, snakes, quicksand, and cannibals. Patchett will discuss State of Wonder at the Nashville Public Library on June 28, 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series.
June 20, 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean didn’t become an astronaut, but the Knoxville novelist’s debut book, The Time It Takes to Fall (2007), required a detailed understanding of astrophysics and of the specific conditions that led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Now, in an new essay in The Huffington Post, Dean explains where her love of space missions came from, and pays tribute to her father, who, Saturday after Saturday, took her to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC., when she was a child:
June 16, 2011 In the June edition of “SoLost,” The Oxford American‘s series of original videos that celebrate the art of getting lost in “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” novelist William Gay, who normally shuns recorded interviews, invited a camera into his Hohenwald cabin, where he proceeded to talk with eloquence about his hometown, his work, and how his repeated playing of a Bob Dylan tune once inspired a girlfriend to walk out: “She dumped me over that song,” he explains, deadpan.
June 13, 2011 Last Wednesday, novelist Ann Patchett appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to discuss her new novel, State of Wonder. It was in many ways a routine discussion about a much-anticipated book by the bestselling author of Bel Canto and Truth & Beauty (among many others), but nearly an hour into the conversation, Patchett casually dropped a bombshell: she and a business partner, former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes, were about to open a new bookstore in Nashville, a city that has been without one for the last six months. “I don’t know if I’m opening an ice shop in the age of Frigidaire,” Patchett said, “but I can’t live in a city that doesn’t have a bookstore.” Chapter 16 caught up with both Hayes and Patchett and talked with them by phone about their plans for Parnassus Books and about the story behind the store.
June 13, 2011 When bestselling novelist Ann Patchett announced that she and a business partner, former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes, would soon be opening a new bookstore in Nashville, the city’s writers responded with joy:
