The journalist Jessica Pearce Rotondi was 8 years old before she heard her mother speak the name of her uncle, Jack Pearce, who vanished when his plane was shot down over Laos in March 1972. In her propulsive memoir, What We Inherit, Rotondi probes her family’s agonized search for truth across three generations.
Samantha Irby’s new collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You, is a spicy cocktail that will intoxicate readers — a few fingers of Dorothy Parker and a splash of comedian Wanda Sykes, as bracing and delicious as a Cosmopolitan.
In Meander Belt, M. Randal O’Wain crafts an impressionistic self-portrait of a young man determined to escape the buzz saw of poverty and a family forever on the edge of disaster. O’Wain will discuss Meander Belt at Novel in Memphis on November 29 and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 14.
Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House traces the complex and often torturous history of a pair of siblings and the alluring mansion they called home, once upon a time.
Etgar Keret’s story collection Fly Already takes readers into a quirky yet penetrating world. Keret will appear at the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville on September 16.
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman recalls her job as a fake concert violinist in her witty memoir, Sounds Like Titanic. Hindman will discuss the book at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
