February 19, 2014 A delight from beginning to end, Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now is filled with unlikely characters whose pain and longing are so real that readers celebrate each small step they take toward something like wholeness. As Quick’s protagonist, Bartholomew Neil, says, “Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t. And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?” Matthew Quick will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

February 18, 2014 Elizabeth Spencer’s story collection, Starting Over, explores the exquisite tension between husbands and wives, parents and children, familial belonging and the yearning of the individual heart. Spencer has published seven previous story collections, and she won the first of her five O. Henry prizes in 1960. She is, by any measure, a master of the form, and the stories in Starting Over show all the deftness and insight for which she has long been known.

February 12, 2014 North Carolina-based author Wiley Cash garnered widespread praise for his 2012 debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, which explored a small town’s dark secret through multiple narrators. He returns to the technique in his new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, a short, gripping thriller in which the action unfolds via four very different voices, against the backdrop of the 1998 home-run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. Cash will discuss and sign This Dark Road to Mercy at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 17, 2014, at 6 p.m.