Book Reviews | Chapter 16

You Get What You Need

Mary Gauthier delves into her life and art in Saved by a Song

By Jacqueline Zeisloft | June 30, 2021

In Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, Grammy-nominated folk musician Mary Gauthier unpacks her ideas around “what makes a song matter.” This investigation takes us through Gauthier’s personal narrative as a queer woman, a survivor of addiction, and an artist who reaches deep into the wounds of her childhood to reckon with her past traumas through song. Gauthier will discuss the book at a ticketed virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 6.

Tales of a Preservationist

A new collection of essays highlights Silas House’s life and work

By Emily Choate | June 28, 2021

The essays in Silas House: Exploring an Appalachian Writer’s Work reflect the high degree of respect and adoration that House has gained among his peers for his novels, music journalism, and plays, as well as his activism. Editor Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt gathers a thoughtful group of Appalachian scholars and literary writers to analyze House’s body of work.

Stranded in Time

The past and present collide in Michael Amos Cody’s story collection

By Tina Chambers | June 23, 2021

The stories in Michael Amos Cody’s A Twilight Reel are peopled with complicated characters — lost, angry, grieving, lonely, violent, and filled with regret, each one searching for some kind of peace. The collection conjures up a small town poised on the brink of a new day, dragging the chains of buried secrets and sorrows firmly behind it.

A New Kind of Homecoming

A woman returns to Memphis and her painful past in Learning to Speak Southern

By Bianca Sass | June 22, 2021

In her second novel, Learning to Speak Southern, Lindsey Rogers Cook tells the story of a globe-trotting woman forced to come home to Memphis, where she must confront her family’s complicated past, as well as the rage she feels toward the South.

The Story They Long For

A wonderfully devious narrator drives Mary Dixie Carter’s debut novel

By Bradley Sides | June 17, 2021

Mary Dixie Carter’s suspense-filled debut thriller, The Photographer, places us in the mind and world of a successful New York City photographer named Delta Dawn.

A Pretty Place to Die

Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills delivers a taut, gripping Kentucky-noir thriller

By Ed Tarkington | June 14, 2021

Few writers today can boast of a body of work as wide-ranging and virtuosic as Chris Offutt’s. His novels and short stories bend genre and upend expectations. The Killing Hills is no exception: A taut, gripping thriller, it also draws us deep into the lives of its troubled characters with wit and compassion. Chris Offutt will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Novel in Memphis on June 17.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher