Chapter 16 - Part 553

Payback, Finally

Rebecca Skloot’s foundation benefits the descendents of Henrietta Lacks

By Margaret Renkl | February 4, 2011

February 4, 2011 Thanks to enormous pre-publication buzz, former Memphis writer Rebecca Skloot had a bestseller on her hands within a day of launching The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her nonfiction book about the woman behind the first immortal cell line in medical history. But unlike the pharmaceutical companies who owe many of their most successful drugs to research involving HeLa cells, Skloot was determined from the beginning to make sure that the descendants of Henrietta Lacks would benefit from her own windfall.

Magic Surrealism

In his stunning first novel, poet Philip Stephens journeys deep into the Missouri Ozarks

By Michael Ray Taylor | February 3, 2011

February 3, 2011 Philip Stephens’s debut novel, Miss Me When I’m Gone, is a brilliant quest narrative featuring two protagonists, one light and one dark, who move through a landscape where the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez operates in a setting that evokes William Faulkner and with a soundtrack that could have come straight out of Willie Nelson’s fever dreams. Stephens will read from Miss Me When I’m Gone at Borders Books in Nashville on February 5 at 2 p.m.

Starting with a Footnote

Dolen Perkins-Valdez turns a little-known bit of history into a powerfully moving novel

By Susannah Felts | February 2, 2011

February 2, 2011 Wilberforce University, near Xenia, Ohio, is one of the nation’s oldest historically black universities, the first to be owned and operated by African Americans. Behind its founding in 1863 is a fascinating yet all-but-forgotten piece of history: the school stands on what was once the site of Tawawa Resort, a place where Southern slaveholders vacationed, often in the company of their enslaved mistresses. It’s this setting that Dolen Perkins-Valdez imagines as the backdrop for her engrossing debut novel, Wench, which Publishers’ Weekly called “heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful.”

Peachtree Memories

When you come from a family who never heard of the Southern storytelling tradition, your only recourse is literature

By Tina LoTufo | February 1, 2011

February 2, 2011 Unlike most publishing houses, we accepted unsolicited manuscripts, and it was my job to wade through the slush pile and pluck out the undiscovered gems. At least half of them turned out to be memoirs of the authors’ rural childhoods. Although there were times when I thought I would go mad if I had to read one more account of hog-killing time, I wrote scores of rejection letters in which I tried to soften the blow with assurances that their children and grandchildren would treasure these priceless written histories for years to come. I doubt the recipients were much comforted, but I was sincere. In fact, I was envious.

Saint Pioneer Feminist

Journalist Bill Briggs traces the canonization of an unlikely miracle worker

By Anne Delana Reeves | January 31, 2011

January 31, 2011 Former Nashville Banner reporter Bill Briggs, now a journalist with MSNBC.com, has written a masterful page-turner, a book that serves as a testament to tenacious research, graceful prose, and a true journalist’s skeptical nature. By following the beatification of Mother Théodore, a nineteenth-century American nun, The Third Miracle: An Ordinary Man, a Medical Mystery, and a Trial of Faith uncovers the secret saint-making practices of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, of course, it is a story about the age-old conflict between faith and science. Briggs will discuss the book at the offices of McNeely Piggott & Fox, in Nashville, on February 1 at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Against Amazon

The Internet giant plans to build two distribution centers in Tennessee, and bookstore owners aren’t happy

By Margaret Renkl | January 29, 2011

January 29, 2011 If you buy your books from Amazon.com, you pay no sales tax; if you buy your books from your friendly neighborhood bookseller– or from the nearest mega-Walmart– you do. That’s because Amazon is a web-only retailer without a physical presence in the state. But if the Internet behemoth opens two massive distributions centers in East Tennessee as planned, it will have one. Nevertheless, Tennessee lawmakers have no plans to require Amazon, which will bring up to 2,000 much-needed jobs to the state, to charge sales tax on books ordered by Tennesseans.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher