January 19, 2012 When We Were Strangers, the debut novel of Knoxvillian Pamela Schoenewaldt, captures the risk and struggle of nineteenth-century immigration through the experience of a young Italian woman, Irma Vitale. Schoenewaldt will read from When We Were Strangers on January 23 at the Hodges Library on the Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee. She will be joined by Marina Maccari-Clayton of the UT History Department, whose specialty is Italian-American immigration history.

January 18, 2012 Despite being turned down by dozens of agents, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus went on to become a bestseller and was published in more than thirty countries. Summit Entertainment, the production company behind the Twilight series, bought film rights, as Morgenstern found herself the star of a real-life fairy tale. Erin Morgenstern will discuss and sign copies of The Night Circus on January 26 at 6:15 p.m. at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.

January 12, 2012 Since her auspicious debut at age twenty-eight with the short-story collection Self-Help, Lorrie Moore has become one of America’s most revered and imitated authors of literary fiction. The recipient of countless awards and honors, including the International Fiction Prize for Birds of America, Moore is among the most influential practitioners of the short-story form. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Lorrie Moore will appear at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 19 at 4:30 p.m. She answered questions from Chapter 16 via email prior to the event.