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.
With The Pinch, Steve Stern continues his dazzling fictional exploration of the intersection of reality, spirituality, and mysticism
May 28, 2015 High-wire acts performed by an acrobatic enchantress; a young couple making love in a giant tree in the midst of an earthquake; a drug-dealing bookstore clerk who finds a decades-old history of his neighborhood and discovers that he himself appears as a character in its pages—these are some of the elements of The Pinch, Steve Stern’s latest novel. Stern will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis at 6 p.m. on June 4, 2015.
Steve Inskeep casts new light on the ideas of land ownership that led to the Trail of Tears
May 27, 2015 In Jacksonland: Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab, Steve Inskeep has produced a compelling study of the interwoven lives of Jackson and Ross, as well as the struggle over land that played out between whites and Native Americans. Inskeep will appear at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville on June 2, 2015, and at the Nashville Public Library on June 4, 2015.
