Frank Bascombe returns for a final road trip in Richard Ford’s Be Mine
Richard Ford’s latest Frank Bascombe novel, Be Mine, marks Frank’s fifth and purportedly final curtain call as whimsical Everyman, shrewdly dissecting the shifting landscape of American life and his uncertain place in it.
Read more
Alice Faye Duncan’s books chronicle Black perseverance, past and present
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Two nonfiction books for children by Memphis writer Alice Faye Duncan illuminate “what it means to be free.”
Read more
I never expected to memorialize my father
My father’s mother wanted “a gentle man” for a second husband, unlike the first. I don’t know about the first, because he died long before my birth and my father rarely mentioned him.
Read more
Book Excerpt: The Comfort of Crows
Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows is a literary devotional that moves through a year of beauty, joy, and grief in the teeming natural world of Renkl’s own backyard. The book includes 52 original color artworks by Billy Renkl and will be published by Spiegel & Grau in October 2023.
Read more
Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married is a tragicomic memoir of marital crisis
Harrison Scott Key’s new memoir, How to Stay Married, relates his wife’s infidelity, his own loss of faith, and the implosion of his marriage followed by its unlikely resurrection. It’s a hoot. Really.
Read more
A writer returns to the Smoky Mountains and The Overstory
“The Overstory,” writes Emily Choate, “is like the Smokies — a lush host to manifold inhabitants, some knowable to the casual visitor and others elusive, inscrutable.” Choate will lead a virtual discussion of Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on July 18.
Read more
