“This Story is Not Yet Over”
The Booksellers at Laurelwood is set to close in February, but the Memphis store’s landlord and other supporters say news of its death may be exaggerated.
Winning the Literary Lotto
Jamey Hatley has received a total of $55,000 this year from the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the National Endowment for the Arts to work on her first novel, The Dream-Singers. The book is set in Memphis, beginning with the birth of twins in 1968—one born as Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his final speech and the other when he is assassinated.
Waiting for Katrina
Salvage the Bones, a National Book Award winner, is the featured title for this year’s Memphis Reads program, and author Jesmyn Ward will be in Memphis to discuss the novel, which is narrated by a pregnant fifteen-year-old whose destitute family faces the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Ward will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 28 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 29 at 6 p.m.
Summoned to Memphis
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in fiction. Groff will be among seventy writers at the 2016 Mid-South Book Festival, held in Memphis September 9-11, 2016. Today she speaks with Chapter 16 about marriage, the trials of portraying anger and death in fiction, and the pleasures of writing in longhand.
A Cape Canaveral of the Soul
Set in Cape Canaveral in the late twentieth century, Patrick Ryan’s stories conjure a rich variety of intriguing souls, from a pregnant teen who wants to be Miss America to a gay sixteen-year-old with a crush on an ex-astronaut. Ryan will discuss The Dream Life of Astronauts in conversation with Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
Dog Years
May 6, 2016 Syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson will talk about The Dogs Buried Over the Bridge: A Memoir in Dog Years, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on May 10, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 15, 2016, at 2 p.m. The book chronicles Johnson’s loves, losses, and Mississippi home life by way of the dogs who shared the journey.
