John Prine’s first official songbook, Beyond Words, collects sixty of his influential songs. It also offers a treasure trove of family photographs, song manuscripts, and short commentaries that highlight the singer’s incisive wit.
Robert Gipe’s new illustrated novel, Weedeater, brings back Dawn Jewell, the unforgettable protagonist of Trampoline, and adds a second narrator: the laconic title character, a lawn worker who watches the opioid crisis roll through coal country.
In his debut story collection, A Thousand Distant Radios, Woody Skinner captures the absurdity of contemporary life with spare language and offbeat humor. Skinner will appear at Novel in Memphis on March 18.
The Atomic City Girls by East Tennessee native Janet Beard is set within the top-secret “instant city” of Oak Ridge during World War II. Beard will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 13 and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 14.
Two of Clyde Edgerton’s beloved early novels, Raney and The Floatplane Notebooks, have been reissued by the University of South Carolina Press in its Southern Revivals series. Edgerton will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.
In Imagine Wanting Only This, a graphic work of nonfiction that is part personal memoir and part travelogue of urban ruins, Kristen Radtke combines brilliant comic art with poetic prose. Radtke will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.
