January 12, 2016 Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, The Guest Room, brings the violence of the international sex trade to a well-to-do New York suburb, as a bachelor party becomes the scene of a bid for freedom by two young women held by Russian mobsters. Bohjalian will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis January 13, 2016.
November 11, 2015 In Leonard Pitts Jr.’s new novel, Grant Park, a newspaper columnist in Chicago who crusades for racial justice is kidnapped by white supremacists on the morning of President Barack Obama’s first election. Pitts, a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, will appear in Memphis, where many of the novel’s historic scenes are set, at 6 p.m. on November 19, 2015, at Crosstown Arts.
October 28, 2015 The story of Valentino Achak Deng’s torturous journey as a “lost boy” of the Sudanese civil war—pursued by lions, vultures, and crocodiles, as well as “human killers”—became the celebrated 2006 novel What Is the What by Dave Eggers. Deng and Eggers are headliners for the 2015 Memphis Reads program, which will offer two free public events on November 4th and 5th.
