Financial historian Gene Dattel looks at the human impact of the cotton trade
April 30, 2010 Financial historian Gene Dattel literally follows the money in his account of America’s cotton trade. In this compelling analysis, he argues that King Cotton was critical to the economic interests of both the North and the South, and that an “amoral” quest for wealth consistently trumped the nation’s qualms about slavery.
Read more
Lee Smith’s new story collection captures the pathos of life outside the big city
April 29, 2010 Lee Smith wrote her first novel, 1968’s The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed while still an undergraduate at Hollins College. Since then she’s written eleven more, plus three collections of short stories. A playwright as well, Smith’s Good Ol’ Girls—written with fellow author Jill McCorkle and featuring music courtesy of Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman—made its off-Broadway debut last winter. With her latest effort, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger: New and Selected Stories, Smith only adds to her successes. As the narrator of “Folk Art” says, “Once you get something going, it takes on a life of its own.” Smith will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 30 at 6 p.m., and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on May 1 at 2 p.m.
Read moreAustin Peay’s literary magazine celebrates twenty-five years
April 28, 2010 In 1985 at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, professors David Till and Malcolm Glass founded a literary magazine which they called Zone 3, in honor of the temperate growing zone of middle Tennessee. This was a staggeringly hopeful endeavor. Even twenty-five years ago, it was not clear that poetry itself—let alone literary magazines devoted to it—would survive the twentieth century. If cable television hadn’t swamped the little boat of lyric poetry, the coming tsunami not yet known as the Internet surely would.
Read more
Award-winning poet Beth Bachmann discusses her work—and the way her sister’s violent death affects it
April 28, 2010 In her first collection, Temper, poet Beth Bachmann grapples with the horror and mystery of violent death. The book’s powerful, carefully crafted poems earned her critical raves and the 2008 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. This spring, Bachmann also won the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given each year to “a first book by a poet of genuine promise.” Bachmann answered questions from Chapter 16 in anticipation of the award ceremony in Pasadena on April 28.
Read more
Hampton Sides’s account of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. reads like a James Ellroy novel
April 27, 2010 Like certain songs and film plots, there are some stories in history—George Washington’s life, D-Day—that can be taken up again and again, stories so captivating that all it takes is a good writer to give them new life. Martin Luther King’s murder is one of them, and Hampton Sides is the writer to tell it. He will give a free public reading from the book at Memphis University School on April 27 at 7 p.m.
Read morePulitzer Prizewinner David Auburn mentors playwrights for Ingram New Works festival
April 26, 2010 David Auburn, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, is the Ingram New Works Fellowship recipient, in town May 6-8 to mentor area playwrights and take part in readings of his new play The Columnist.
Read more
