March 18, 2011 Readers in Knoxville were still mourning the impending loss of Carpe Librum, the beloved independent, when the news came that Ohio-based bookstore chain Joseph-Beth would close Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, a fixture in the community for thirty years.
March 17, 2011 Today Garrison Keillor’s daily NPR feature, The Writer’s Almanac, will highlight a poem from Mark Jarman’s new collection, Bone Fires. “A Prayer for Our Daughters” begins with these lovely lines:
May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven’t written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.
March 16, 2011 When the Queen of Daytime TV first launched her on-screen book club, she also launched the careers of any number of literary novelists who had labored in obscurity, if not outright poverty, until touched by Oprah’s golden wand. Former Nashvillian A. Manette Ansay earned enough money from the Oprah-fueled sales of her novel, Vinegar Hill, to seek a cure for the mysterious affliction that had kept her confined to a wheelchair for two decades: “The bottom line here is extraordinary good luck,” she writes on her website. If Oprah hadn’t happened to pick up a book I’d written at the age of 25, I would not be walking today. I would not have a child. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d even be alive.”
March 15, 2011 Daniel J. Sharfstein writes the best kind of history book: one that explains what really happened to human beings of earlier days, and why the truth of their lives is more nuanced and less straightforward than received wisdom tends to suggest. In The Invisible Line, Sharfstein tells the stories of mixed-race people in the nineteenth century who managed–almost always through unstated collusion with their white neighbors–to defy the so-called “one-drop rule,” which held that anyone with a single drop of African blood was by definition black.
March 11, 2011 Steve Earle spent decades as a below-the-radar genius with passionate fans but not a lot of literary recognition outside the world of songwriting. In fact, Earle is not only a hit songwriter (for Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Travis Tritt, The Pretenders, Joan Baez, and others, including himself; his last three albums won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album), but also a playwright, author of the short-story collection Doghouse Roses, and a scholar of the work of James Agee.
March 8, 2011 In her book Power Trip, Nashville journalist Amanda Little explored the many ways Americans use oil without even knowing it. As Little reiterates in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, the net effect of this invisible petroleum consumption is far more than just pain at the pump: “Virtually everything we consume—from hamburgers, running shoes and chemotherapy to Facebook, Lady Gaga MP3s and ’60 Minutes’—is produced from or powered by fossil fuels and their byproducts, all of which could grow more costly as the price of petroleum rises.”
