50 Books / HT50

This installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series is entirely devoted to novels and features two deftly comic tales, a searing depiction of Stalin’s gulag, a finely wrought drama set in occupied Japan, and an Appalachian story of beauty, climate change, and personal evolution.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Black Zodiac, Charles Wright pursues timeless questions of aging and mortality.

The years from 2006 to 2010 brought a shocking financial crisis and the global Great Recession that followed, but there was happier news in the Tennessee book world, as well as a new outlet for reporting it: Chapter 16 was launched in September 2009. This seventh installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series includes two Pulitzer Prize winners, a riveting account of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and two highly praised novels.

The books in this installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series are a varied lot — two novels, one nonfiction book, and two poetry collections, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. All the authors have strong ties to the South, however, and two are Tennessee natives.

Cormac McCarthy made his name and fame in the West, but his most enduring character was Knoxville river rat Cornelius Suttree.

The beginning of the 21st century brought Tennessee a new sports team, a rowdy anti-tax protest, and the publication of a controversial book.