March 21, 2011 Al Gore has left Rodale, publisher of his mega-bestselling books, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Our Choice (2009), and plans to publish his next book with Random House. (A third bestseller, The Assault on Reason, was published by Penguin in 2007.) The still-untitled book, reportedly about “our global future,” is due next year and will be edited by Jon Meacham, a Chattanooga native who recently left his post as editor of Newsweek.

March 18, 2011 Readers in Knoxville were still mourning the impending loss of Carpe Librum, the beloved independent, when the news came that Ohio-based bookstore chain Joseph-Beth would close Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, a fixture in the community for thirty years.

March 16, 2011 When the Queen of Daytime TV first launched her on-screen book club, she also launched the careers of any number of literary novelists who had labored in obscurity, if not outright poverty, until touched by Oprah’s golden wand. Former Nashvillian A. Manette Ansay earned enough money from the Oprah-fueled sales of her novel, Vinegar Hill, to seek a cure for the mysterious affliction that had kept her confined to a wheelchair for two decades: “The bottom line here is extraordinary good luck,” she writes on her website. If Oprah hadn’t happened to pick up a book I’d written at the age of 25, I would not be walking today. I would not have a child. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d even be alive.”