War on Words

By Peggy Burch

November 11, 2015

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.

Delicious Words

By Peggy Burch

October 28, 2015

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.

“Though Pavese is now most famous for his fiction, he was a poet first of all, and Hard Labor was the work for which he hoped to be remembered. It is a book, he once said, “that might have saved a generation.” William Arrowsmith’s translations—with their strong lines and bold American diction—marvelously convey the spirit and complex vitality of the original.”

~the publisher