Abundant Goodness
A Committed Conservative
She’s on the Bird
Good Sport
Obsessed with Understanding
Chapter 16
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Hymns to Passion

Marilyn Kallet’s new poems explore the lighter and darker sides of love

By Maria Browning |

April 8, 2013 Dante, Beatrice, and Baudelaire help Marilyn Kallet explore modern love in her new poetry collection, The Love That Moves Me. In connection with the book’s launch, Kallet will give several readings in Knoxville: on April 10 in the Goins Buidling Auditorium at Pellissippi State Community College, on April 15 at the Hodges Library Auditorium on the University of Tennessee campus, and on April 21 at Union Ave. Books. Kallet will share the PSCC and UT readings with poet Arthur Smith. Click here for event details.

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Diverse Voices

Debut collections from poets Will Schutt and Joshua Robbins strike distinctly different tones

By Maria Browning |

April 5, 2013 Debut collections from two acclaimed Tennessee poets display a healthy diversity of sensibilities in contemporary American poetry. Will Schutt’s Westerly and Joshua Robbins’s Praise Nothing deliver elegantly crafted verse and moving insight, but their perspectives are vastly different. Joshua Robbins will appear at Union Ave Books in Knoxville on April 7 at 3 p.m. He and Will Schutt will appear together at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 13 at 2 p.m.

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The Consequences of Certainty

Acclaimed scholar Randall Fuller discusses the impact of the Civil War on Walt Whitman’s poetic vision

By Ed Tarkington |

April 4, 2013 In From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, Randall Fuller chronicles the evolution of Walt Whitman’s poetic vision of heroic American identity. The tragedy of the war, Fuller writes, gave Whitman “a gift both precious and dangerous.” On April 11 at 7 p.m., Randall Fuller will discuss Whitman as part of the Civil War Sesquicentennial Series at Rhodes College in Memphis. The event is free and open to the public.

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A Very Close Deal

Novelist Jay McInerney and editor Gary Fisketjon have been collaborating on books—and drinking Jack Daniel’s together—for the last thirty-nine years

By Stephen Usery |

April 3, 2013 Legendary Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon and acclaimed writer Jay McInerney have been friends since their college days, and Fisketjon has been McInerney’s editor since the publication Bright Lights, Big City. In fact, as McInerney tells Chapter 16 in this interview, he wrote the first page of the novel after coming home to Fisketjon’s apartment at five in the morning, after a long night on the town. McInerney and Fisketjon will appear on April 7 at the Nashville Public Library in a program of the Nashville Writer’s Circle hosted by John Seigenthaler and William M. Akers. A reception begins at 2 p.m. with the program following at 2:30. Both are free and open to the public.

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Literary Co-Conspirators

By Stephen Usery |

April 3, 2013 Acclaimed author Jay McInerney is most noted for his many novels, including Bright Lights, Big City and The Last of the Savages, but he is also the wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal and has published three collections of essays from the column, including The Juice: Vinous Veritas, which will be released next week in paperback.

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Twisted Tales

Jamie Quatro’s stunning debut collection portrays Lookout Mountain in stories that are haunting, provocative, and delightfully weird

By Michael Ray Taylor |

April 2, 2013 There is little danger that Jamie Quatro’s stunning debut collection, I Want to Show You More will ever be shelved with science fiction. The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and many other publications have hailed Quatro as a significant new voice in American literature and rightly so. Yet her odd and beautiful stories are built on the devices of science fiction: a couple who sleep in a bed divided by the decomposing corpse of the wife’s distant lover, a runner who must carry a heavy government-provided trophy through a marathon, a young athlete with a whirlpool in his heart. On April 11 at 6:30 p.m., Jamie Quatro will discuss I Want to Show You More at Parnassus Books in Nashville, where she will appear with Jessica Francis Kane, author of This Close. Quatro will also appear on April 18 at the Chattanooga Public Library on April 18 at 9 a.m. as part of the Celebration of Southern Literature, and on April 27 at 2 p.m. at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville.

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