Understanding the work of poetry and place
Joy Harjo’s Catching the Light offers short vignettes on the meaning of language, poetry, and place, taking us to a realm between ordinary reality and artistic vision.
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Toil and Trouble surveys witchy history
In Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult, Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson profile religious leaders, entertainers, psychic mediums, healers, activists, and more, from Puritan New England to the witch-friendly grounds of social media today.
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A close look at death helps a boy grab hold of life
Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s The Decomposition of Jack features a boy whose daily chores include the collection of roadkill. It’s a slightly gross, very funny, sweetly poignant story about so much more than death. Tubb will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 26.
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Jon Meacham highlights Abraham Lincoln’s moral code in a new, essential biography
Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham continues his exploration of moral leadership and America’s search for a more perfect union in And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. Meacham will discuss the book at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on October 23.
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Evil haunts every corner of Erica Waters’ The Restless Dark
In Erica Waters’ The Restless Dark, three young women navigate an insidious landscape, the true-crime podcast-loving people around them, and their own darkest impulses. Erica Waters will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.
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Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet takes on entwined familial and artistic legacies
When Ada Calhoun undertakes the task of completing a literary biography of Frank O’Hara — a project that had stumped her art critic father decades earlier — she engages complex dynamics of familial angst and artistic ambition, which she details in Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. Calhoun will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 14-16.
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