The healing chugs on, even as grief sometimes circles back
I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.
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Stacy Willingham delivers a complex mystery driven by female friendship
In her new thriller, Only if You’re Lucky, Stacy Willingham slowly unravels a knotted, twisted tale of loss, revenge, and manipulation. Willingham will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on January 20 and Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 24.
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In Eric Schlich’s new novel, a preacher’s son comes clean about his near-death experience
In Eric Schlich’s new novel, Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife, the son of a Bible-belt minister begins to doubt his own story about visiting heaven. Schlich will discuss Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife at Novel in Memphis on January 16.
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Khaled Mattawa’s lyrical cartography of human migration remembers, inspires
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In his fifth collection, Fugitive Atlas, poet Khaled Mattawa — a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — issues a timely invitation to examine our many migrations, gently calling us out of ourselves and into the world. In a series of imaginative and provocative poems, he asks us to consider the borders that exist off the map and apply meaning to our real lives.
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50 Books / HT50, Part 5: 1998-2001
The beginning of the 21st century brought Tennessee a new sports team, a rowdy anti-tax protest, and the publication of a controversial book.
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Ann Mulhearn explains how Catholic women shaped social justice in Memphis
In Social Justice from Outside the Walls, Ann Youngblood Mulhearn tells the story of six Catholic women — three Black, three white — whose activism changed Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s. An engaging and well-told book, it combines religious, political, and African American history to add a key dimension to a city that stood at the heart of the struggle for social justice.
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