Chapter 16 - Part 334

One Giant Step Back

Margaret Lazarus Dean bids a nuanced farewell to American spaceflight

By Michael Ray Taylor | May 14, 2015

May 14, 2015 In 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean drove repeatedly from her home in Knoxville to Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch the final launches of the three surviving craft in the American space-shuttle fleet. In Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight, she recounts these trips and reflects eloquently on what it means to have lost the ability to launch humans into space from U.S. soil. Dean will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 18, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

Magical Mystery Tour

Chapter 16 talks with Deborah Harkness, who continues the alchemical adventure she began in A Discovery of Witches

By Tina LoTufo | May 13, 2015

May 13, 2015 In The Book of Life, Deborah Harkness completes her bestselling All Souls trilogy that began with A Discovery of Witches. Harkness will read from and sign copies of The Book of Life at Salon@615 at the Nashville Public Library on Thursday, May 28, 2015, at 6:15 p.m.

Bop Symphony

Richard J. Alley delivers life, hot and cool, in his debut novel, Five Night Stand

By Randy Fox | May 12, 2015

May 12, 2015 In his new novel, Five Night Stand, Memphis author Richard J. Alley weaves the lives of three characters into a bop symphony that’s driven by hopes, dreams, doubt, and the redemptive power of music. Alley will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on May 21, 2015, at 5:30 p.m.

Trouble Broaching

Caki Wilkinson’s The Wynona Stone Poems is a comic novel in verse

By Maria Browning | May 11, 2015

May 11, 2015 Caki Wilkinson’s second collection, The Wynona Stone Poems, tells the story of a smart, spirited woman who, in spite of having her fair share of talent and passion, can’t quite make her life happen.

A Typesetter’s Love Letter to Books

Taking a love of the printed word to a new level

By Lindsay Lynch | May 8, 2015

May 8, 2015 When one of my old friends finally asked me what exactly I was doing in Nashville, I said I was working in a letterpress shop that specialized in nineteenth-century printing techniques. I left out the fact that I wasn’t being paid. Even so, at the moment, it sounded a whole lot better than toiling away at law school.

A Reading Festival That Gets It Right

Knox County Library finds the joy in summer reading

By Julie Danielson | May 7, 2015

May 7, 2015 With a stellar lineup of award-winning children’s authors and illustrators from all over the country, Knoxville is getting ready for the eleventh annual Children’s Festival of Reading. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at World’s Fair Park on May 16, 2015, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses