September 12, 2010 Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks recently gave up her position at the University of Memphis to move to Chicago. Today she speaks with the Commercial Appeal‘s Richard Morgan about her years in Memphis and their importance in the creation of a bestseller. Read the story here.
September 2, 2010 Abraham Verghese’s novel, Cutting For Stone, is one of six finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction. The prize carries a $10,000 honorarium and is the “only annual literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace,” according to a website about the awards.
August 30, 2010 Susan Gregg Gilmore was understandably thrilled when NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse called her debut novel, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, a “stand out” coming-of-age story which gets the recipe for that genre “almost just right.” She was equally understandably less thrilled when he also noted that the book “reads like meringue when you really want pie.”
August 28, 2010 Memphis native Alan Lightman is a scientist and a bestselling author– two roles rarely played by the same person. In an essay for the M.I.T. Communications Forum, he asks a number of questions about the role of experts in the mainstream: “How does the intellectual stand both outside society and inside society? How does the intellectual find common ground between what is of deeply personal and private interest and also what is of public interest?
August 27, 2010 When Susan Gregg Gilmore returned to Nashville after thirty years, she turned a novelist’s eye on her own hometown. The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove tells the story of a daughter of privilege—who grows up on what’s left of an antebellum plantation where thoroughbred horses were once raised—at a time of profound social change. Coming of age in a house where a deeply unhappy, alcoholic mother terrorizes not only the servants but her own children, Bezellia struggles to find a way to live in a world where her sole reliable sources of love are the people who are paid to care for her. Susan Gregg Gilmore will read from The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove at Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville on August 28 at 2 p.m.
August 23, 2010 If there’s any question about whether it’s still possible to be a Renaissance man in the digital age, the answer is Michael Sims. Though he would never describe himself by such a self-congratulatory term, the Crossville native is nonetheless a poet, photographer, essayist, critic, editor, biographer, and the acclaimed author of four books about science and nature. Today he speaks with Chapter 16 about his first autobiographical effort, Kingfisher Days.
