Chapter 16 - Part 281

A Park is Born

Following the success of last year’s Smoky Jack, Ken Wise and Anne Bridges revive another memoir by Paul J. Adams

By Michael Ray Taylor | January 25, 2017

In 1925 a young man from Knoxville named Paul Adams established the first permanent camp atop Mt. Le Conte, the highest peak in what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Editors Ken Wise and Anne Bridges have now updated Adams’s memoir, Mount Le Conte, first published fifty years ago, as a follow-up to Smoky Jack, which was published posthumously last year.

Finding Holmes

Michael Sims investigates the very real origins of the greatest fictional detective

By Chris Scott | January 24, 2017

With The Story of Charlotte’s Web and The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims invented what amounts to a new genre: the biography of a particular book. In Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, he follows literary and historical clues to identify the origins of the most famous fictional detective in the world.

Fearless and Exacting

The new Sewanee Review will appear the end of this month, and “new” hardly begins to describe it

By Brooks Egerton | January 23, 2017

Novelist Adam Ross, the first new editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, will launch the storied literary magazine’s redesign on January 31. In it, there’s enough transgression to satisfy the spirit of Tennessee Williams, whose bequest supports the Review’s publication.

They Looked Away

In The Second Mrs. Hockaday, Susan Rivers has created an original Civil War tale

By Jennie Fields | January 20, 2017

Loosely based on a real incident, The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers is the tale of a pampered seventeen-year-old daughter of a South Carolina plantation owner who marries a widowed Confederate major. Rivers will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 25 at 6:30 p.m.

The Dysfunctional Village

In Perfect Little World, Kevin Wilson depicts an experiment in communal parenting

By Maria Browning | January 19, 2017

In Kevin Wilson’s Perfect Little World, a child psychologist’s Infinite Family Project brings ten newborns and their parents to a compound outside Nashville, where they will live and grow together, their every need met. Wilson will discuss his second novel at Bounty on Broad in Memphis on January 24 at 6 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26 at 6:30 p.m.

Clear-Eyed Mystic

Joy Harjo’s poems celebrate transcendence and confront fear

By Maria Browning | January 18, 2017

Acclaimed poet Joy Harjo’s most recent collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, delivers the exquisite mix of beauty, transcendence, and pain her work is known for. Harjo joined the creative-writing faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville this year and will give a free public reading at UT’s Hodges Library on January 23 at 7 p.m.

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