Chapter 16 - Part 335

On Digging Clay, Selling Meth, and Paternal Domination

By Stephen Usery | April 22, 2015

April 22, 2015 David Joy’s debut novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, paints such a vivid portrait of meth dealing in the Appalachians that one journalist accused Joy of having sold meth earlier in his life. In this podcast interview Joy talks about the difference between meth and crack cultures, drafting and revising, and the expectations of both first and second novels. He will appear at 6:30 p.m. on May 1, 2015, at Parnassus Books in Nashville, and at 2 p.m. on May 2, 2015, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville.

Movie Magic

Corey Mesler’s Memphis Movie is a wild ride of a novel

By Maria Browning | April 21, 2015

April 21, 2015 An almost-washed-up movie director returns to his hometown to make an indie film that just might salvage his career. That’s the premise of Memphis Movie, Corey Mesler’s wild ride of a novel, which combines Hollywood cynicism with Memphis soul to create a comic tale with a sweet afterglow. Mesler will read from his novel at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 30, 2015, at 5:30 p.m.

An Insignificant Balcony

Perhaps history is anything that is found in the past and repeated in the future

By Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay | April 20, 2015

April 20, 2015 The steps to our little balcony seem narrower each time, my hands tracing the delicate staircase. I forget the feeling of cool metal under my fingertips and dust that covers every millimeter of space until I have made it to the top, realizing what I’ve missed all along. There stand my grandparents in the doorframe with stolen time in their skin and longing in their veins.

Growing Home

An only child contemplates her unlikely path to motherhood

By Jen Wallwork Dominguez | April 20, 2015

April 20, 2015 My parents entered into marriage under the duress of an unplanned pregnancy, and spent the next nine brutal years locked up together, punishing each other for the mistake. By the time I graduated high school I had decided that I would never have children.

Enough Light to Prove the World Exists

In Crimes Against Birds, Denton Loving tends the landscapes, and dreamscapes, of Appalachia

By Emily Choate | April 17, 2015

April 17, 2015 In Denton Loving’s debut poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds, the rhythms of the waking world and the dream world hold equal power. Set among the narrow mountain roads, apple orchards, and cattle pastures of southern Appalachia, these poems push beyond bucolic portraits of nature. They ask us to wake up even as we descend into dreams.

Something Curious to Write About

A revealing one-sided correspondence is at the heart of Dear Hank Williams by Kimberly Willis Holt

By Tracy Barrett | April 16, 2015

April 16, 2015 In Dear Hank Williams, National Book Award-winning children’s author Kimberly Willis Holt tells the story of an eleven-year-old in 1940s Louisiana through letters the girl writes to Hank Williams. Holt will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 22 at 6:30 p.m.

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down