How We Feel About Reality
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 29, 2014 In Still Life with Bread Crumbs, the new novel by Pulitzer Prizewinner Anna Quindlen, Rebecca Winter is famous for a single photograph she took years earlier. But fame doesn’t pay the bills indefinitely, and Rebecca sets out to find new inspiration in some unlikely places. Quindlen will discuss the book on February 5, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. in Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
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.
November 25, 2013 Selected Poems by the late Wilmer Mills includes poems about building a house, plowing a field, and crafting a cradle, among others. This poet, who died in 2011 at age forty-one, writes from specific, hands-on experience but also sees beyond the ordinary to touch what is timeless in each act.