Library Journal gives a starred review to Dracula’s Guest, a new collection of stories edited by Michael Sims
April 9, 2010 There’s nary a hormone-charged teenager in sight, but Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories will chill the blood of serious readers wondering how vampires managed to sink their teeth into the popular imagination. Patricia Altner, writing in this week’s issue of Library Journal, gives the book a starred review.
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Hugh Ambrose’s companion book to The Pacific, the HBO miniseries, recreates hell in words
No one with any sense of history can doubt the human capacity for violence, hate, destruction, and killing. In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose (son of the late historian Stephen Ambrose) provides an intimate picture of that capacity. The book chronicles the war experiences of four Marines and a Navy pilot in the Pacific war against Japan. Ambrose appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on April 12 at 7 p.m.
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Humanities Tennessee welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This epic is an atypical coming-of-age story about the literary-minded Oscar, along with meditations, both comic and tragic, on the members of his Dominican family. More broadly, however, it’s a biography of the relationship between then and now, there and here—between present-day New Jersey and the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Raphael Trujillo in the 1930s and 1940s. While it explores the complicated journeys made by the children of immigrants in America, the book also reminds us, with mesmerizing stories of generations past, that our homeland is never very far away. Díaz will speak in Memphis at the Germantown Performing Arts Center at 10:30 a.m. on April 8, and in Nashville at Stratford High School auditorium at 9 a.m. on April 9.
Read moreNashville novelist Adam Ross snags rhapsodic reviews in both Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly
April 8, 2010 The buzz about Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, has been building all year, and Ross just keeps getting good news. Last week, the pre-publication industry news journal Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review, calling it “an intellectual noir novel that shows evidence of an original voice.”
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In her latest book in the Miss Julia series, Ann B. Ross considers the lunatic reach of love
In Miss Julia Renews Her Vows, the eleventh book of the series, Ann B. Ross gives her heroine about all she can handle. And readers will love every page of the adventure. Ross will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 9 at 7 p.m.
Read moreVanderbilt MFA candidates launch a new literary magazine
April 7, 2010 Graduate students in Vanderbilt University's nationally ranked MFA program have launched a national literary magazine, Nashville Review. The online journal, which went live on April 1, is a daunting project the students "conceived of, pursued, and brought into being all by themselves," says poet—and Vanderbilt professor of creative writing—Kate Daniels.
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