Novelist Ed Tarkington reflects on the deep ambivalence that lies at the heart of Peter Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Summons to Memphis
June 17, 2016 In the sixth of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, novelist Ed Tarkington considers the problematic culture depicted in Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
In Julia Franks’s debut novel Over the Plain Houses, a Depression-era farm wife seeks solace in the wilderness
June 16, 2016 In Julia Franks’s Over the Plain Houses, set in western North Carolina farm country in 1939, a married woman begins to fill the witching hours of night by roaming the wild hills surrounding her farm. Her husband, an evangelical preacher, becomes convinced that his once-pious wife has repudiated God. Franks will discuss Over the Plain Houses at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 23, 2016, at 6 p.m.
June 15, 2016 Gary McDowell is the author of a collection of lyric essays and five collections of poetry, including Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None. His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. He will read from Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 20, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
June 14, 2016 William Woolfitt is the author of Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014) and Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016). His poems and stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Blackbird, and other journals. An assistant professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, he will read from his new poetry collection at Bar Marley in Knoxville on June 19, 2016, at 1 p.m.
Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poems finally allowed Kate Daniels to call herself a Southern writer
June 10, 2016 Robert Penn Warren is the only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize in both poetry and fiction—and he won for poetry twice: in 1958 for Promises: Poems and in 1979 for Now and Then: Poems. In the fifth of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, poet Kate Daniels remembers the way Warren’s poetry helped her confront an ugly past.
In her new novel, Dorothea Benton Frank tattles on one-percenters behaving badly
June 9, 2016 Olivia Ritchie has a nice life. She’s madly in love with her husband, a professor who has just retired, and she has a rewarding career as an interior designer for the super-rich. Dorothea Benton Frank’s latest novel, All Summer Long, takes readers on a tour of the life of the one percent while also investigating what makes a happy marriage. Frank will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on June 13, 2016, at 6 p.m.
