Alice Faye Duncan celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the joy of African American music
Memphis-born storyteller Alice Faye Duncan has made it her life’s mission further the message of Martin Luther King Jr. through her transcendent work as a children’s author, educator, and librarian. Her recent picture books celebrate African American music as a source of joy and a form of resistance.
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Bite by Bite is a nourishing, lyrical sampler
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest book, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, offers a veritable smorgasbord of flavors and a multi-course menu of memories. Nezhukumatathil will appear at Begonia Labs in Nashville on January 16.
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We’d miss them if they weren’t around
I was sitting at the bar of a subpar pub. On the stool next to me sat a glittering heap of rouge and jewels which proved to be a woman of advanced years. She couldn’t’ve been a duchess, not at O’Finnegan’s. But there was something distinctly aristocratic about the way she fingered her pearls.
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Geoffrey Himes describes the marriage of country music and modern sensibilities
The conceit of Geoffrey Himes’ In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985 is that a group of ambitious country and pop musicians found a way to make country even more adult than it had been previously.
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Poet Maria Zoccola brings Homeric mythology to small-town Tennessee in Helen of Troy, 1993
In her mesmerizing debut, Helen of Troy, 1993, poet Maria Zoccola merges the mythological and the modern, casting Helen of Troy as a restless housewife and mother in Sparta, Tennessee. Zoccola will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on January 14.
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Playworld, a new novel by Adam Ross, observes a year in the life of a Manhattan teenager
In Playworld, novelist Adam Ross depicts a Manhattan teenager who ricochets between acting for television and bumbling in reality. Ross will discuss Playworld with Mayor Freddie O’Connell at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 6.
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