David Burnsworth explores the seedy side of Charleston in his debut novel
June 5, 2015 Brack Pelton plans to have a birthday dinner with his uncle in a nice Charleston restaurant but instead ends up holding him as he dies. Brack has no idea why anyone would want to kill his hippie, bar-owning uncle, but he’s determined to find out. David Burnsworth will discuss his debut novel, Southern Heat, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 13, 2015, at 2 p.m.
In a new Body Farm novel, Jefferson Bass heaps Job-like catastrophes on the famous forensic anthropologist
June 4, 2015 In The Breaking Point, their ninth Body Farm novel, Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass, collectively known as Jefferson Bass, inflict every possible personal and professional disaster on their protagonist, Bill Brockton. He should break, but will he? Jefferson Bass will appear this month in Maryville, Nashville, Memphis, and at several Knoxville locations.
Marja Mills remembers her time as Harper Lee’s next-door neighbor
June 3, 2015 When Marja Mills lived next door to Harper Lee, she frequently dined with the legendary author of To Kill A Mockingbird, her sister Alice, and their close circle of friends. Mills will discuss her memoir about the experience, The Mockingbird Next Door, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 10, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
In Matthew Thomas’s debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves, striving Irish Americans learn to improvise when tragedy threatens to derail their dreams
June 2, 2015 In Matthew Thomas’s debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves, Eileen Tumulty is determined to rise above her Irish working-class roots. When she meets Ed Leary, a scientist who is also from Queens, she thinks she has found the perfect companion to accompany her on the upward journey. Matthew Thomas will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 5, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
Novelist Steve Stern found his fictional world by searching for a lost Jewish tradition
June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.
At the end of his life, as his own power waned, James Dickey was still writing about joy
May 29, 2015 Death, and the Day’s Light, James Dickey’s new collection, echoes the eternal, obsessive themes of the late poet’s work: war and love, life and death, the clarifying power of a shared struggle. But these poems also reflect the concerns of a man at the end of his life. Set firmly in the physical world, they speak to the link between body and spirit: as the body breaks, the spirit builds.
