Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Let’s Go, Girls

Her Country makes the case for a more inclusive country music industry

In Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be, Marissa R. Moss gets to the deep struggles women in country music have faced and argues for a more inclusive industry. Moss will discuss Her Country at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 10 and at the Tennessee State Museum on June 9.

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Stories More Like Memories

A family’s storytelling tradition hides and reveals a history of domestic abuse

The Crocodile Bride, the debut novel by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, is a gripping family saga about the power of storytelling — especially its ability to warm and soften the edges of cold, harsh reality. Pedersen creates a world at once tragic and beautiful, violent and magical, desperately impoverished yet rich in meaning.

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Reckoning as an Act of Love

Emily Bingham exposes the tortuous, white supremacist history behind a familiar song

In My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, Emily Bingham reveals the strange career of revisions, evasions, lies, mythmaking, and forgetting behind Stephen Foster’s iconic ballad.

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A Cosmos of Its Own

Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House multiplies the world of A Visit from the Goon Squad

In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan revisits characters she created in A Visit to the Goon Squad. Now they confront a techno-capitalist future in which consumers allow their minds to be accessed. Egan will discuss The Candy House at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 4.

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The Mission of the Family

Love rules in Adriana Trigiani’s The Good Left Undone

Adriana Trigiani’s new novel is a sweeping, multigenerational romance rooted in Tuscany. Trigiani will discuss The Good Left Undone at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 6.

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War in the Streets

Don Winslow’s City on Fire sets a mob war in gray 1980s New England

Don Winslow draws on Homer’s Iliad to craft a modern-day crime classic pitting Irish and Italian American mob families against each other in 1980s Rhode Island. Winslow will discuss City on Fire at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 3.

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