Chapter 16 - Part 309

How Charles Portis Kept Me Sane

Ray Midge didn’t lie down and give up when his wife ran off with her ex-husband, and there’s a lesson in his perseverance

By Gerald Duff | April 22, 2016

April 22, 2016 I crammed down all the medication allowed me, wrapped a bag of ice around the cast and what showed of my forearm, and lowered myself onto the bed beside my wife. She did her best to talk me down. “Don’t think so much,” she said. “Try to read something.” To humor her, I reached with my good hand and picked up the first book I touched on the bedside table. It was Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South.

Dancing with Lost Souls

Sonja Livingston resurrects forgotten women and girls in Ladies Night at the Dreamland

By Maria Browning | April 21, 2016

April 21, 2016 Sonja Livingston’s second essay collection, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, is a kind of literary search-and-rescue effort. In twenty-one delicately crafted pieces, she brings forth a remarkable group of little-known women and girls from the past, imagining her way into their lives with lyrical intensity. Livingston will discuss the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

Worst and Worster

In a new memoir, the punk band NOFX tells all

By Sarah Carter | April 20, 2016

April 20, 2016 In the band’s recent tell-all, NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, Fat Mike, Melvin, Smelly, and El Hefe share their personal and musical epiphanies. NOFX will discuss their new memoir at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 26, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

Different Drums

Writing as E.F. Abbott, children’s author Kristin O’Donnell Tubb transforms a legend into a lesson in John Lincoln Clem: Civil War Drummer Boy

By Win Bassett | April 19, 2016

April 19, 2016 The fourth book in Macmillan’s “Based on a True Story” series for middle-grade readers, John Lincoln Clem: Civil War Drummer Boy, is the tale of Johnny Clem, a drummer boy for the Union side during the Battle of Shiloh. Writing under the pseudonym of E.F. Abbott, Williamson County author Kristin O’Donnell Tubb tells a story that’s something less than history and something more than fiction. Tubb will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 24, 2016, at 2 p.m.

Points of Juncture

In Bryn Chancellor’s debut story collection, When Are You Coming Home?, characters maneuver passageways between their past and present lives

By Emily Choate | April 18, 2016

April 18, 2016 In her debut story collection, When Are You Coming Home?, Bryn Chancellor creates characters who confront change in their personal landscapes, transitioning from one era of life to another. Chancellor will discuss When Are You Coming Home? at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on April 21, 2016, at 7 p.m.

Countdown: T Minus 19 Months

Another space-themed book deal for Margaret Lazarus Dean

By Margaret Renkl | April 18, 2016

April 18, 2016 Astronaut Scott Kelly, whose master’s degree is from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, will write a memoir with Margaret Lazarus Dean, a novelist and nonfiction writer at the same university. The book, Endurance: My Year in Space and Our Journey to Mars, will be published in November 2017.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher