March 25, 2010 Not every novel featuring a young protagonist is appropriate for young readers, but Silas House didn’t want to exclude anyone when he wrote Eli the Good. As House tells Darnell Arnoult, “I just wanted to write a book that anyone could read, so I made sure that it was suitable for high school and on up.” But an open-armed welcome to teen readers doesn’t mean the book is boring for adults, he adds.
In 1977, Laura Bell—who grew up in Nashville—traveled to Wyoming for a short visit and never left. Her memoir, Claiming Ground, can more than hold its own against any survivor narrative of failed love and misplaced ambition, against any epic quest for understanding and mercy, and in language so tempered, spare, and beautiful that it rivals any poem’s. In the context of celebrity tell-alls and fabricated survivor narratives, literary worth is only rarely the measure of a memoir’s success, but if ever a book deserved to be a bestseller, Claiming Ground surely does. Laura Bell will discuss her memoir at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on March 31 at 7 p.m.
Marshall Chapman wraps her first movie, Love Don’t Let Me Down; the Los Angeles Times salutes Richard Bausch‘s Something Is Out There; and Ann Patchett‘s 2001 novel Bel Canto finally reaches the stage.
Nashville debut novelist Adam Ross is keeping Stephen King up at night, Jon Meacham adds a weekly television show to his to-do list, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hits the number-two slot on The New York Times bestseller list—and its author, Rebecca Skloot, is tapped for an appearance on The Colbert Report.
With new books by Memphis authors Richard Bausch, Molly Caldwell Crosby, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and the Publishing Juggernaut Formerly Known As Rebecca Skloot now garnering national coverage, Tennessee’s River City is enjoying a season in the literary sun.
Last fall, Poets & Writers named Vanderbilt University one of the top twenty creative-writing programs in the nation. Two weeks ago Beth Bachmann, a poet in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt, learned she had won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book, Temper. Last week, the Blues Foundation announced that Vanderbilt nonfiction writer-in-residence Peter Guralnick would be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. This week the PEN/Faulkner Foundation named five fiction finalists for 2010, and Lorraine Lopez, author of the story collection Homicide Survivors Picnic, was on the short list. Care to guess where she teaches?
