Absurdity and Tenderness
George Singleton’s The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs shows the storyteller in top form. Singleton will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.
Book Reviews
A Museum of Revelations
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.
Seeking Consensus
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.
The Wonderful Inseparability of Form and Content
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.
Freedom Fighter
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.
Romance and Revolution
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.
