Lorrie Moore discusses death, humor, and her sensational new novel
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home braids the diary of a 19th-century spinster with a modern-day road trip story. With her signature dry humor and mastery of metaphor, Lorrie Moore leaves bodies in her wake.
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Linda Parsons’ Valediction gives form to final farewells.
In Valediction: Poems and Prose, Linda Parsons meditates on what is essential in life as she weeds the garden, weathers a pandemic, and weighs her personal losses. Parsons will read from her work at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 24.
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Book Excerpt: The Comfort of Crows
Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows is a literary devotional that moves through a year of beauty, joy, and grief in the teeming natural world of Renkl’s own backyard. The book includes 52 original color artworks by Billy Renkl and will be published by Spiegel & Grau in October 2023.
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Julia Franks’ The Say So recalls a time when unwed mothers were hidden
Julia Franks’ second novel, The Say So, serves as a cautionary tale exploring the starkly different choices unwed mothers in the 1950s faced compared to those in the post-Roe 1980s. Her cross-generational narrative was inspired in part by her own unplanned pregnancy. Franks will appear at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on June 14.
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Rachel Louise Martin chronicles the battle to desegregate an East Tennessee high school
Rachel Louise Martin’s A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation recounts the story of the “Clinton 12,” who in 1956 were the first students to desegregate an all-white public high school in the South. Martin will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 14 and Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 20.
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A girl and her cat help each other survive brutality and war
Doan Phuong Nguyen mines family history as well as world history in her debut novel for young readers, set in South Vietnam in the 1960s. She will discuss Mèo and Bé at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 24.
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