A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Peace a Long Time Coming

For Barbara Presnell, the loss of her father at age 14 would lead to a decades-long period of repressed mourning, resulting in depression and estrangement from her family. Her memoir, Otherwise, I’m Fine, recounts the pain of that time and how retracing her father’s steps during World War II brought her peace and a renewed relationship with her family.

“Who Do You Think You Are?”

In The Trouble of Color, Martha S. Jones interrogates how her Kentucky ancestors negotiated the “color line” and what it has meant in her own life.

A Parable of Young Womanhood

In her debut novel, Girls with Long Shadows, Tennessee Hill follows the identical Binderup triplets — Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C — as adulthood and community attitudes intrude on their deep bond.

In the Drink

The William Faulkner we meet in Lisa C. Hickman’s Between Grief and Nothing could have been one of his own doom-struck characters.

A Timely Reckoning

David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.

Busy Dreams

Over four decades, Richard Bausch has come to be regarded as one of literature’s foremost practitioners of the short story. Few have limned the struggles of the human heart in a forlorn world with comparable skill. Bausch’s people are — there’s no better way of saying it — us. His new collection, The Fate of Others, is a luminous addition to his formidable legacy.

Visit the Book Reviews archives chronologically below or search for an article

TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING