Michael Ray Taylor

In A Window to Heaven: The Daring First Ascent of Denali: America’s Wildest Peak, Monteagle writer Patrick Dean chronicles the adventurous life of Hudson Stuck, a Sewanee graduate and Episcopal priest who was by turns a climber, cowboy, literature professor, master of the Iditarod, and above all an advocate for the rights and dignity of native Alaskans. On June 7, 1913, Stuck and a contentious team became the first climbers to successfully summit North America’s highest peak. Dean will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by the Sewanee School of Letters on March 4.

“Why can’t we tell our own stories?” asks the young hero of Pop: An Illustrated Novel, the final installment of Robert Gipe’s groundbreaking Canard County trilogy. Amid the weight of the past and poverty, the 2016 presidential election, sexual assault, and an invading mess of movie people, his nuanced characters do exactly that — in fine prose and disarmingly simple drawings.

Spenser faces an old nemesis in Someone to Watch Over Me, Ace Atkins’ ninth addition to the late Robert B. Parker’s much-loved series. Accompanied by his friend Hawk and new protégé Mattie, the detective chases a billionaire sex trafficker from Boston to the Caribbean, drawing the interest of the strange villain known as the Gray Man.

In His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt, has written a moving, rigorously researched account of the late congressman’s life, with an afterword written by Lewis himself. Meacham will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 25.