Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Hamilton Cain

Suffused with Color and Light and Personality

The Afterlives is a departure for Thomas Pierce

At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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A Life’s Work to Save the Planet

Despite climate calamities unfolding daily around the globe, Al Gore finds hope for the future

An Inconvenient Sequel unpacks the latest scientific data about climate change and spotlights ongoing advocacy efforts around the world. For this book Al Gore focuses on three simple questions: “Must we change?” “Can we change?” “Will we change?”

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The Stench of Slavery

Ben H. Winters creates an alternate history in which the Civil War never took place

In the alternative history Ben H. Winters creates in Underground Airlines, slavery has flourished in the Hard Four—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and a unified Carolina—because it is essential to the economic prosperity of the plantations. Winters will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15. Festival events are free and open to the public.

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Who’s Responsible for Changing Racist Minds?

Ibram X. Kendi will discuss his National Book Award-winning history of racism at the Nashville Public Library

Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an achievement, astonishing for its ingenious structure, breadth of research, wealth of anecdote, and engaging conversational voice. Kendi will appear at the Nashville Public Library on September 15 at 6:15 p.m.

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A Castle on a Mountaintop

Denise Kiernan tells the story of building the Biltmore

In The Last Castle Denise Kiernan tells the story of George W. Vanderbilt, who hired famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted to build him the largest private residence in the U.S. Kiernan will discuss The Girls of Atomic City at the Grove Theater in Oak Ridge on September 15 at 6 p.m. as part of the city’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. She will discuss The Last Castle at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, which will be held in Nashville October 13-15.

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When Literature is a Lifeline

At nineteen, Clay Byars became a writer after a stroke left him unable to talk

In Will & I, Sewanee alum Clay Byars joins the ranks of memorable memoirists facing disability with remarkable courage. He will discuss Will & I at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 22 at 2 p.m.

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