Margaret Renkl

April 12, 2011 Adam Prince, a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has sold his first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men. The book will appear late next year from Black Lawrence Press. This is the same publisher which will be bringing out a new poetry chapbook by Prince’s wife, Charlotte Pence. Clearly the Pence-Prince family is having a very good year in a very lousy publishing climate.

April 11, 2011 On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, who led the Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded that the Union surrender Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. U.S. Major Robert Anderson refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire in the opening battle of the Civil War. To mark the 150th anniversary of this epic conflict, the Modern Library is reissuing Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume history of the war, and PBS is once again airing the Ken Burns documentary that prominently featured interviews with Foote.

April 7, 2011 In March, the NPR book club read Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, and today Verghese answers questions posted by the audience on the NPR Books Facebook page.

April 4, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. died on April 4, 1968, when a single shot fired from a flophouse across the street felled him as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Writer Hampton Sides was six years old when King was murdered, a story he tells in his recent book of narrative nonfiction, Hellhound on His Trail.