Novelist Thrity Umrigar examines themes of home, family relationships, and social class
Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, The Museum of Failures, brings readers to vibrant Bombay through a protagonist reconciling a complicated relationship with home. Umrigar will discuss The Museum of Failures at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.
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Steve Inskeep depicts a principled Lincoln who built coalitions out of thin air
Steve Inskeep’s Differ We Must delivers a brisk yet incisive collection of 16 encounters throughout the course of Abraham Lincoln’s career, revealing valuable lessons for our own time. Inskeep will appear with historian Heather Cox Richardson at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library on October 12.
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Oxford scholar Emma Smith on the cultural history of the book
Emma Smith’s Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers is a critical look at books as objects and the ways they have been bought and sold, used and abused, feared and celebrated, reviled and fetishized, bound, banned, and burned throughout history. Smith will deliver the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment Lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis on October 19.
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A trip through the mind of civil rights icon Julian Bond
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Race Man: Selected Works, 1960-2015 collects a wide array of writings from civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose life provides a model of servant leadership.
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Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors creates a world of false facades and alter egos
In Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, celebrated writer W. Somerset Maugham visits friends in the Malay Peninsula during a time of personal crisis and political upheaval. Tan will discuss The House of Doors at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.
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Poet Terrance Hayes minds and mines language in a pair of new books
In a new poetry collection and a volume of prose and images, poet Terrance Hayes undertakes a multi-faceted exploration of expression. Terrance Hayes will appear at Tennessee State University’s Otis Floyd Campus Center in Nashville on October 18 at 7 p.m. as part of the 2023 Southern Festival of Books.
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