April 26, 2016 Mathews County, Virginia, has a long tradition of supplying seafaring men to the Merchant Marine. In The Mathews Men, Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats, William Geroux writes of the exceptional service and sacrifice during World War II of the seamen from Mathews County. He will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville May 3, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
January 28, 2016 The Upper Cumberland region—i.e. the watershed counties of the upstream half of the Cumberland River in Kentucky and Tennessee—was relatively isolated for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as a result, it was neglected by historians. Its history is rich and worth investigating, however, as editors Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson prove with People of the Upper Cumberland.
January 22, 2016 Burdy is Karen Spears Zacharias’ second novel based on Christian Bend, “a way-back place” in the mountains of East Tennessee. It features Burdy, one of the vividly-drawn characters of that tiny community, as she tracks down a townsman presumed dead after the Normandy invasion.
October 5, 2015 In Sweetland, Newfoundland poet and novelist Michael Crummey has crafted a moving tale of mortality, both communal and individual. He will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.
June 4, 2015 In The Breaking Point, their ninth Body Farm novel, Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass, collectively known as Jefferson Bass, inflict every possible personal and professional disaster on their protagonist, Bill Brockton. He should break, but will he? Jefferson Bass will appear this month in Maryville, Nashville, Memphis, and at several Knoxville locations.
March 26, 2014 In Before the Volunteer State, Kristofer Ray has gathered essays from eight scholars that add layers of complexity to the superficial story Tennesseans learn in school. The real story of Tennessee begins much earlier, in the anthropological records left by Native Americans as they adapted to European contacts. Then came the influx of settlers and frontier fortune hunters, and then the wars. The birth of Tennessee was not as simple, painless, or edifying as we may have thought.
