June 20, 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean didn’t become an astronaut, but the Knoxville novelist’s debut book, The Time It Takes to Fall (2007), required a detailed understanding of astrophysics and of the specific conditions that led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Now, in an new essay in The Huffington Post, Dean explains where her love of space missions came from, and pays tribute to her father, who, Saturday after Saturday, took her to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC., when she was a child:

June 16, 2011 In the June edition of “SoLost,” The Oxford American‘s series of original videos that celebrate the art of getting lost in “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” novelist William Gay, who normally shuns recorded interviews, invited a camera into his Hohenwald cabin, where he proceeded to talk with eloquence about his hometown, his work, and how his repeated playing of a Bob Dylan tune once inspired a girlfriend to walk out: “She dumped me over that song,” he explains, deadpan.