Tyler J. Kelley chronicles great American rivers and a century of effort to control them
The Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Arkansas rivers loom large in American history. In Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways, Tyler J. Kelley uses the stories of several memorable characters to examine the history of efforts to tame the rivers. He also considers a daunting future of crumbling levees and rising waters.
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I wandered in as though I’d been there many times before
When I was a freshman at Vanderbilt, 18 years old, I heard a rumor that there was a market down on Elliston Place that would sell beer to you, even if you were underage, as long as you were cool about it. It was called the Hurry Back Market, and I was underage.
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A wonderfully devious narrator drives Mary Dixie Carter’s debut novel
Mary Dixie Carter’s suspense-filled debut thriller, The Photographer, places us in the mind and world of a successful New York City photographer named Delta Dawn.
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R. Marie Griffith reckons with the past, present, and future in Making the World Over
Chattanooga-born R. Marie Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the history of American religion, mines the depths of America’s past, arguing that our beloved national timeline is intertwined with — and often defined by — past injustices toward women, people of color, and immigrants, sins that continue to haunt us today.
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Book Excerpt: Where the Wind Comes From
Richard Jackson has published 26 books, including 15 books of poems: most recently, Take Five (2020) and Broken Horizons (2018). He has been teaching at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga since 1976, where he directs the Meacham Writers’ Workshop.
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Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills delivers a taut, gripping Kentucky-noir thriller
Few writers today can boast of a body of work as wide-ranging and virtuosic as Chris Offutt’s. His novels and short stories bend genre and upend expectations. The Killing Hills is no exception: A taut, gripping thriller, it also draws us deep into the lives of its troubled characters with wit and compassion. Chris Offutt will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Novel in Memphis on June 17.
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