Chapter 16 - Part 384

“God’s Sound Check”

By R.B. Morris | February 28, 2014

February 28, 2014 R.B. Morris is a Knoxville poet, songwriter, solo performer, band leader, and a sometimes-playwright and actor. He has published books of poetry and music albums, and he wrote and acted in The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony, a one-man play taken from the life and work of writer James Agee. He was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. R.B. Morris will read from The Mockingbird Poems at the John C. Hodges Library Auditorium on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on March 3, 2014, at 7 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.

Beautifully, Flawlessly, Carefully

A new story collection by Lorrie Moore, who recently moved to Nashville, is always a Big Event in literary fiction

By Susannah Felts | February 27, 2014

February 27, 2014 In her previous story collection, Birds of America, Lorrie Moore toed the line between tragic and comic with a grace few writers manage. Stories with heartbreaking premises, delivered with a heaping spoonful of wry wit: this is Moore’s brand of genius, and it is again revealed in Bark, a volume of eight stories whose arrival is a bona fide Big Event in the world of literary fiction—and not just in Moore’s new hometown of Nashville.

Between the Happening and the Telling

Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel puts an unusual spin on family dysfunction

By Tina LoTufo | February 26, 2014

February 26, 2014 Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the 2014 Nashville Reads book selection, is interested in memory and language and story, perhaps because Rosemary has been struggling with the story of her own life since she was five years old, when her unusual sister Fern disappeared, inflicting a trauma so deep that neither Rosemary nor her family has ever fully recovered. The Nashville Reads Kickoff event, “Drop Everything and Read,” will be held March 3, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library at 2 p.m. Guest readers include Mayor Karl Dean, novelist Ann Patchett, and songwriter Janis Ian, among others. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.

Telling the Truth

Courtney C. Stevens offers up a debut novel for young adults

By Sarah Norris | February 25, 2014

February 25, 2014 Faking Normal by Nashville resident Courtney C. Stevens is a gripping debut novel for young adults. In the story, a sixteen-year-old girl who acts as if everything is fine is compelled, for better or worse, to reckon with and expose the demons from her past. Courtney C. Stevens will discuss Faking Normal at Nashville’s Parnassus Books on February 25, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

A Deliberate Life

In The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims follows along the path of self-discovery that led to Walden Pond

By Ed Tarkington | February 24, 2014

February 24, 2014 “In the decades since first encountering Walden in my late teens, I had often glimpsed Thoreau as the bearded sage of literature, natural history, or civil liberties,” writes Michael Sims. “I had seldom met the awkward young man who loved to sing, who ran a private school and applied his engineering skills to the pencil business, who popped popcorn and performed magic tricks for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, faced his own illnesses and the deaths of loved ones, and tried to make it as a freelance writer in New York City.” In The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Sims offers a portrait of a young man who went on to mold both American literature and American identity. Sims will appear at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville on April 11, 2014, with a book-signing at 6 p.m. and a free public address at 7 p.m.

Something New Inside

In divorce, Tova Mirvis discovers an unexpected sense of promise

By Margaret Renkl | February 20, 2014

February 20, 2014 Novelist Tova Mirvis grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Memphis. As expected, she became engaged at twenty-two to an Orthodox Jewish man she met on a blind date. As expected, she followed the laws and expectations of her community, even as she wondered, “Is this all true?”

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