What’s new in Tennessee books—and at Chapter 16—on March 25, 2010
Junot Diaz visits Tennessee, Silas House is invited to BEA for an award ceremony, Jay McInerney lifts a glass to The Wall Street Journal, Rebecca Skloot heads home to Memphis (temporarily), and River Jordan hits the road on her Southern Wing and a Prayer tour.
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In Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, Mississippian Brad Watson returns to familiar territory—and reinvents it
Brad Watson‘s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, returns to the post-Faulkner, post-modern South of bleak strip malls, cheap motels, tacky Gulf Coast beaches, and lonely outposts surrounded by murky water, the faint odor of decay, and the ever-present specters of longing and loss. But despite the well-known milieu, these new stories demonstrate a mastery of the surreal that lifts them above the typical conventions of Southern Gothic. Brad Watson will be at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 30.
Read moreDarnell Arnoult interviews Silas House about his latest novel
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.
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In The Girl Who Chased the Moon, Sarah Addison Allen stirs up a sweet froth of a mystery
Mullaby, North Carolina, is like many a small Southern town, complete with barbeque joints, eccentrics, and neighbors with long memories. The setting for author Sarah Addison Allen‘s latest novel, The Girl Who Chased the Moon, Mullaby is a place where mysteries are so commonplace the town’s inhabitants have come to view them with an air of blasé acceptance. Allen will be in Nashville to read from her gentle new mystery at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on March 25 at 7 p.m.
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Michael Martone talks about ruined cities, rewired culture, and collapsing categories
Michael Martone has made a literary career out of re-imagining the ordinary, from the landscape of his native Indiana to the college sweatshirt. In anticipation of his reading at APSU on March 31, he answers questions from Chapter 16 about his fascination with place, his relationship with readers, and whether there’s a need for more college creative-writing programs.
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In the harsh landscape of Wyoming, Nashvillian Laura Bell finds her elemental home
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.
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