Mark Greaney’s seventh Gray Man novel, Agent in Place, launches Court Gentry, professional assassin and occasional CIA agent, on an unlikely mission to Syria to retrieve the infant son of a brutal dictator. Greaney will appear on February 24 at Novel in Memphis.
SouthWord Literary Feast, a biennial book festival and reunion of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, will feature forty celebrated Southern authors, including Wendell Berry, Charles Frazier, Jill McCorkle, and Ron Rash. Seating is available for talks, readings, panel discussions, book signings, and meals November 3 and 4.
Australian author Markus Zusak, whose novel The Book Thief is the 2017 Memphis Reads selection, will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 11 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 12 at 7 p.m. Both talks are free and open to the public.
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward will be in Nashville to talk about her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in which a Mississippi family grapples with drugs, grief, and ghosts. She’ll appear at Parnassus Books on September 12 at 6:30 p.m.
A cast of visionaries and eccentrics populates The Potlikker Papers, from Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Freedom Farm and Pig Bank, to Edna Lewis, who could tell when a cake was done by listening to it.
Chuck Klosterman X collects some of the journalist’s writing about sports, music, and topics as disparate as zombies and steroids in a book the subtitle describes as “A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century.” Klosterman will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. on May 23.
