In her debut novel for adults, bestselling YA novelist Diane Les Becquets pits two very different women against the wilderness, and the past
February 3, 2016 Diane Les Becquets’s new novel, Breaking Wild, follows two women on either side of a pursuit deep into the Colorado wilderness, leading to confrontations with both the past and the present. Les Becquets will discuss Breaking Wild at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 9, 20016, at 6:30 p.m.
With the launch of Star Line Books, Star Lowe celebrates her faith in Chattanooga readers
February 2, 2016 Star Line Books, Chattanooga’s only independent bookstore, opened last August just across Market Street from the famed Chattanooga Choo-Choo. Owner Star Lowe is passionate about books, her customers, and the Chattanooga community. She only wishes she had more time to read.
Mary Karr celebrates the examined life in The Art of Memoir
February 1, 2016 Mary Karr, one of the contemporary masters of memoir, is a true believer in the transformative power of the form. In The Art of Memoir, she offers a short course in the joys and challenges of writing the story of your own life. She will appear in discussion with songwriter Rodney Crowell at the Green Door Gourmet in Nashville on February 6, 2016. The event is a benefit for The Porch Writers’ Collective.
On sabbatical in Baltimore, a Nashville poet considers our shared humanity
January 29, 2016 We look over the side of the pier and wonder where footholds might help a person up, but we can’t find any. We think of last night’s drinkers, one of whom might have stumbled in. We think of despair—so many homeless, so many loves gone bad—and we think of families, but we see no one who looks any more personally involved than simply considering the hazards of his own living.
Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson have collected fifteen essays on the history of the Upper Cumberland
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.
Ruta Sepetys’s new YA novel returns to the ravaged landscape—and people—of World War II
January 27, 2016 In Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys—Nashville-based author of the chillingly beautiful 2011 novel, Between Shades of Gray, about a Lithuanian family sent to a Soviet work camp—tells another tale of displacement and tragedy at the end of World War II as the Red Army advances on Prussia. Sepetys will celebrate the book’s launch at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 2, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
