July 1, 2010 Knoxville writer Katie Allison Granju wrote the book on parenting. Specifically, she’s co-author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child, which in 1999 made “co-sleeping” and “baby-wearing” household terms, and she’s written on the subject for a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and Babble. When Granju’s 18-year-old son Henry died on May 31 of a brutal beating he sustained during a drug deal gone wrong, every parent who heard the story was forced to face the same thought: “If this could happen to Katie Allison Granju, it could happen to me.”

June 30, 2010 Today and tomorrow, Macy’s customers across Tennessee can pay three dollars for a coupon that offers ten dollars off the cost of a fifty-dollar purchase. More importantly, that three-dollar investment goes into the coffers of the national office of Reading Is Fundamental , the largest literacy nonprofit in the U.S., which in turn gives one dollar back to the local RIF chapter. Last year alone, the campaign raised $3.1 million and provided 800,000 kids with 2.5 million books.

June 29, 2010 The book’s been out only a week, but already it might be time for reviewers to invest in a thesaurus. Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, is inspiring the same adjectives again and again: “challenging,” “ingenious,” “brilliant,” “riveting,” and the surprisingly recurrent “audacious.”

June 21, 2010 Yesterday on ReadRollShow, Rebecca Skloot answered a question about how she came up with the seemingly unique structural organization of her runaway bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Turns out, Fannie Flagg had a lot to do with it. Watch the clip here.

June 17, 2010 Michael Sims has at least two literary careers (and that’s not counting his budding career as a photographer): he’s the author of four books about science and nature, and he’s the editor of five collections of Victorian-and Edwardian literature. His sixth outing as an editor, Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories will hit shelves next week.