In East Nashville, Her Bookshop and Atomic Nashville offer two new buy-local options
Quietly bucking the Online Behemoth That Shall Not Be Named, two new bookstores in East Nashville offer a quirky and beautiful array of books. Plus a shopping experience that’s personal, human, and as far from an algorithm as it can be.
Read more
Alan Lightman talks about his Memphis memoir, Screening Room
In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—poet, novelist, and playwright—tells the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, but it is also wholly the story of Lightman himself as he struggles to understand his own place as a white, Jewish man in the segregated South.
Read more
The burgeoning field of Cormac McCarthy scholarship offers surprising insights
To writers and scholars who have followed his career for decades, Cormac McCarthy is as notorious for his perceived reclusiveness as for his astonishing body of work. With Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King takes a deep dive into the McCarthy Archive at Texas State University and emerges with a lucid account of McCarthy’s transition from Tennessee to the Southwest.
Read more
Lydia Peelle’s debut novel, The Midnight Cool, is a tale of two Tennessee horse traders during World War I
In Lydia Peelle’s debut novel, The Midnight Cool, a pair of itinerant horse traders is drawn into a web of mystery, love, and opportunity as WWI throws the country into turmoil. Peelle will read from the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 16, Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 21, and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 10. At each event, Peelle’s husband, Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, will perform music from the era.
Read more
Book excerpt: The Heronry
The Heronry is the eleventh collection of poems by celebrated Nashville poet Mark Jarman. The book will be released on January 10, and Jarman will give a public reading from it at Vanderbilt University on February 23. Here’s an early look: two poems.
Read more
Book excerpt: Perfect Little World
Kevin Wilson’s second novel, Perfect Little World, will be released on January 24, and he will give readings from it at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 24 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 26. In this excerpt, Dr. Preston Grind meets a wealthy benefactor with an idea for a research experiment to prove the truth of the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child.
Read more
