Book Excerpt: The Comfort of Crows
Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows is a literary devotional that moves through a year of beauty, joy, and grief in the teeming natural world of Renkl’s own backyard. The book includes 52 original color artworks by Billy Renkl and will be published by Spiegel & Grau in October 2023.
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Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married is a tragicomic memoir of marital crisis
Harrison Scott Key’s new memoir, How to Stay Married, relates his wife’s infidelity, his own loss of faith, and the implosion of his marriage followed by its unlikely resurrection. It’s a hoot. Really.
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A writer returns to the Smoky Mountains and The Overstory
“The Overstory,” writes Emily Choate, “is like the Smokies — a lush host to manifold inhabitants, some knowable to the casual visitor and others elusive, inscrutable.” Choate will lead a virtual discussion of Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on July 18.
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50 Books / HT50, Part 1: 1973-1978
As Humanities Tennessee celebrates its 50th birthday this year, we’re marking the occasion by highlighting 50 notable Tennessee books that have appeared over the past five decades.
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Julia Franks’ The Say So recalls a time when unwed mothers were hidden
Julia Franks’ second novel, The Say So, serves as a cautionary tale exploring the starkly different choices unwed mothers in the 1950s faced compared to those in the post-Roe 1980s. Her cross-generational narrative was inspired in part by her own unplanned pregnancy. Franks will appear at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on June 14.
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A woman reckons with the past in Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones
Polly Stewart’s crime novel The Good Ones centers a young woman’s disappearance within an intricate web of mysteries and the expectations that define womanhood in the South. Stewart will discuss The Good Ones at Novel in Memphis on June 13.
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