Abundant Goodness
Dangerous People
How Country Grew Up
‘When You’re Dead We’ll Cherish You Again’
Infinite Little Island
Chapter 16
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Gudgers Unbound

In an article in The Atlantic, Christina Davidson tracks down the descendants of the family James Agee lived with while researching Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

By Margaret Renkl |

April 9, 2010 When writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans went to Alabama in 1936, their assignment was to come back with an article for Fortune magazine about tenant farmers living in desperate poverty in the Depression-era South. For eight weeks, Agee and Evans lived in Moundville, Alabama, primarily with the Burroughs family.

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A Bloody Good Read

Library Journal gives a starred review to Dracula’s Guest, a new collection of stories edited by Michael Sims

By Margaret Renkl |

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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Nothing Pacific About This War

Hugh Ambrose’s companion book to The Pacific, the HBO miniseries, recreates hell in words

By Ralph Bowden |

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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"Wondrous" is the Word

Humanities Tennessee welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz

By Melissa Davis |

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.

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"Inspired Debut"

Nashville novelist Adam Ross snags rhapsodic reviews in both Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly

By Margaret Renkl |

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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Crazy About Miss Julia

In her latest book in the Miss Julia series, Ann B. Ross considers the lunatic reach of love

By Faye Jones |

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.

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