October 11, 2010 A doctor’s hands are in danger of being replaced by an array of medical devices, fears Abraham Verghese, the former Johnson City writer and physician whose first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a national bestseller. According to a new profile in The New York Times, Verghese “is on a mission to bring back something he considers a lost art: the physical exam.
October 8, 2010 Writing tends to be a reclusive art, but Humanities Tennessee has lured 265 authors out of their garrets for the twenty-second annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word. The festival, a free event for the whole family, will be held this weekend in Nashville on Legislative Plaza. Whether your tastes run to memoirs or cookbooks, literary novels or thrillers, biographies or beach reads, picture books for the kids or adult-only fare, this year’s sessions cover the literary waterfront.
September 25, 2010 Young novelists “who have yet to learn the hard lesson that there really is no reinventing the wheel” may not understand why storytellers need to have an actual story to tell, but Ann Patchett likes a good plot: “As for me, I’m a great fan of a story,” she writes in today’s Wall Street Journal. “A tale well told can sweep up a reader in a way that dazzling characters, piercing language and startling ideas can’t manage on their own.
September 18, 2010 Silas House– the novelist, poet, and playwright who recently resigned his position at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate to head to Berea College in his native Kentucky– has long been an outspoken regional advocate for environmental preservation in the Appalachian Mountains. Today, in an op-ed piece for the Lexington Herald-Leader, House lays out an airtight case against the form of mining known as mountaintop removal and explains why “Appalachia Rising, a mass mobilization in Washington, D.C. Sept.
September 17, 2010 The Academy of American Poets announced this week that Khaled Mattawa, a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, has been awarded the 2010 Academy Fellowship. Awarded once a year “for distinguished poetic achievement,” the fellowship carries a stipend of $25,000.
September 16, 2010 Of all the manifestations youthful idealism can take, perhaps the most earnest—and also the most apt to end in disappointment—is the one recorded so memorably by Henry David Thoreau. Walden; or, Life in the Woods was first published in 1854, and for the last 150 years it has inspired a certain kind of young person to move to the wilderness and “live deliberately.” Thoreau’s own life in the woods lasted two years. Jim Minick’s dream of being an organic blueberry farmer lasted a decade longer than that. Minick will discuss his memoir, The Blueberry Years, at 3 p.m. on September 17 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, and 2 p.m. on September 18 at Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville.
