A Fool’s Game?
Is a career in music worth the heartache? That’s the question for Maggie Corbin, the protagonist of Susannah Felts’ new novel, The Come Apart. Felts will appear in Nashville at Vinyl Tap on June 17 and Vanderbilt University on July 9.
2026 Southern Festival of Books
Reckless Awe
Jeff Hardin’s latest poetry collection, Coming into an Inheritance, offers a balm for our chaotic times through poems that convey the grace of nature and the power of art.
The Masculinity Gap
In American Men, Jordan Ritter Conn tracks the lives of four representative souls whose torturous journeys reveal the gap between what men are supposed to be and who they really are.
The Legacy of an American Griot
In Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World, Lucas L. Johnson II sketches the history of Alex Haley’s Roots and its TV adaptation, surveying their impact through commentary from scholars, genealogists, artists, and ordinary people from different walks of life. Johnson will sign and discuss the book at the Z. Alexander Looby Theater in Nashville on June 14.
Hearing Voices
Seventeen-year-old Stella Bohdan is a medium in 1912 New York City who finds her connection to the spirit world a dubious distinction: “I am never alone, never, and yet I’m the loneliest person I know, dead or alive,” Stella complains in The Spiritualists, the debut YA novel by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb. The author will appear at Bound Booksellers in Franklin on June 6 and Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville on June 11.
All Our Unforeseen Lives
Three recent poetry collections — Ian Hall’s Creekwater Mansions, Gaylord Brewer’s Goodbye, Baby, and Rachel Landrum Crumble’s In Praise of Detours — give voice to times of turbulence and upheaval.
