Roy Blount Jr. addresses the challenges inherent in the creation of Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln
November 19, 2012 In the November issue of Smithsonian magazine, Roy Blount Jr., a Vanderbilt graduate who has written about everything from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup to the streets of New Orleans, details the challenge of bringing Abraham Lincoln’s presidency to the big screen in Stephen Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln.
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November 16, 2012 Marcel Brouwers, a first-generation American, has lived in Chicago, Seoul, Prague, Zihuatanejo, Kalamazoo, and Cassis, France. He currently lives in Knoxville, where he teaches in the University of Tennessee’s English department and serves as director of the UTK Writing Center. He is also the author of The Rose Industrial Complex, a chapbook of poems published by Finishing Line Press in 2009. He will read from his new collection, The Old Cities, on November 25 at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville. The event begins at 2 p.m.
Read moreMemphis native Alan Lightman speaks in his hometown about “The Physicist as Humanist”
November 16, 2012 Novelist, essayist, physicist, MIT professor, and Memphis native Alan Lightman will make an appearance at the First Unitarian Church of Memphis on November 16th. His lecture topic, “The Physicist as Humanist: Science, Art, and Religion,” speaks to the complex interplay between science and metaphysics that are at the heart of Lightman’s most recent book, Mr g: A Novel about the Creation.
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Opposites attract in Lauren Morrill’s new YA novel
November 15, 2012 When brainy, uptight, rule-following Julia Lichtenstein sets out on her junior-year class trip to London, she can’t wait to soak up the old-world ambiance of historical sites associated with her literary heroes. But that’s before Mrs. Tennison, her teacher and chaperone, alphabetically assigns each student a buddy, and Julia is suddenly saddled with Jason Lippincott, a vulgar, arrogant, rule-breaking jerk. Of course, opposites attract and romance ensues, but as William Shakespeare himself once wrote, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” In Meant To Be, the new YA novel by Maryville native Lauren Morrill, Julia is in for a bumpy ride indeed. Lauren Morrill will discuss Meant to Be at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on November 16 at 6 p.m.
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Fred Russell may have entered the clubhouse on the coattails of legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, but once he got there, he was home
November 14, 2012 Two of the most celebrated sportswriters in American history were born a generation apart and attended the same university: Grantland Rice graduated from Vanderbilt in 1901, and Fred Russell followed in 1927. Russell idolized his predecessor and emulated him in some ways, but their differences were significant, and most of them bend in Russell’s favor. Andrew Derr’s new biography, Life of Dreams: The Good Times of Sportswriter Fred Russell, brings some needed balance to a comparison of the illustrious careers of these two Vanderbilt icons.
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In The Hills Remember, Johnson City poet Ted Olson collects James Still’s beautiful stories of Appalachian life
November 13, 2012 The difficulty of finding work during the Depression drew poet and novelist James Still to Knott County, Kentucky, but it was the wild beauty of the place that kept him there. As he got to know the fiercely independent inhabitants of a harsh landscape, he began to write about their lives. In The Hills Remember, editor Ted Olson, professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, has put together a collection of Still’s short pieces spanning more than forty years. In them Still’s own voice emerges, as clear and as pure as a dipperful of cold mountain water.
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