Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

A Protection Against Oblivion

Lindsey A. Freeman’s unconventional memoir recreates a childhood in the atomic city

A frequent visitor to her grandparents’ Oak Ridge home as a child, sociologist Lindsey A. Freeman grew up under the shadow of an atomic cloud, an experience she explores in a new memoir, This Atom Bomb in Me.

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Mother is a Circle

Absence haunts Sophia Shalmiyev’s captivating memoir, Mother Winter

In her debut memoir, Mother Winter, Sophia Shalmiyev creates a haunting, lyrical meditation on her troubled mother, an alcoholic whom Shalmiyev and her father left behind when they emigrated to the United States from Russia. Shalmiyev will discuss Mother Winter at Third Man Records in Nashville on April 28.

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Revisiting the Movement

Robert Penn Warren’s 1964 interviews with civil-rights activists get an updated look

With Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews, editors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis encourage a new community of readers to revisit the ideas and experiences of civil-rights activists and thinkers during the movement’s height.

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Secret Lives

Mania meets narcissism—and murder—in R.J. Jacobs’s debut thriller

In And Then You Were Gone, Nashville debut novelist R.J. Jacobs creates an unlikely heroine in a child psychologist with an unstable past. Jacobs, a practicing psychologist, will appear at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on April 27.

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When Science Was Bipartisan

Nathaniel Rich looks back at a decade when addressing climate change seemed well within our grasp

“Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979,” writes Nathaniel Rich in Losing Earth. “The conditions for success were so favorable that they have the quality of a fable.” Rich will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17.

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Intimate Strangers

A new essay collection edited by Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith explores the mother-child relationship

Mothers and Strangers, edited by Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith, features explorations of what Serageldin calls the “most intimate of strangers, the women who raised us.” Serageldin and Smith will discuss the essay collection at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 12. Smith will also appear with Jill McCorkle, Marshall Chapman, and Matraca Berg in a performance of Good Ol’ Girls at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville on April 11.

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