Zadie Smith’s Swing Time looks at female love and cruelty
Zadie Smith’s Swing Time tells the story of a childhood friendship and grapples with themes of race, class, and gender. It transcends the personal without ever losing sight of human passion, embodied in the intense feelings between two little girls. Smith will appear at Belmont University in Nashville on January 19 at 6:30 p.m.
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Tim Gautreaux’s new story collection draws tentative hope out of modern malaise
Tim Gautreaux’s wide-ranging new collection, Signals, expertly examines a variety of broken lives, speaking plainly of suffering but also offering glimpses of hope and redemption. He will discuss Signals at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on January 19, and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 1.
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Tayari Jones talks with Chapter 16 about the bigamous marriages at the heart of her acclaimed novel, Silver Sparrow
In Silver Sparrow, the third novel by Tayari Jones, two girls born four months apart share a father who is secretly married to both of their mothers. Jones will read Silver Sparrow at the Camp House in Chattanooga on January 19 at 6 p.m. The event, part of Chattanooga State Community College’s Writers@Work initiative, is free and open to the public.
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The Booksellers at Laurelwood is closing, but hopes are high that another store will rise from its ashes
After thirty-two years in business, The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis has announced that it is closing. But readers in Memphis have good reason to hope the disaster can still be reversed.
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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.
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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.
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