The past and present collide in Michael Amos Cody’s story collection
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.
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A woman returns to Memphis and her painful past in Learning to Speak Southern
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.
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A wonderfully devious narrator drives Mary Dixie Carter’s debut novel
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.
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Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills delivers a taut, gripping Kentucky-noir thriller
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.
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Troubled kids find a balm for pain in the love of a good dog
Luna Howls at the Moon is Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s third middle-grade novel to feature a service dog as protagonist and narrator, a charming device that works well in this case to illustrate the value of pairing therapy animals with troubled children. Tubb will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 15.
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In The Speaking Stone, Michael Griffith considers the contingent nature of existence
In The Speaking Stone, a collection of essays, Michael Griffith ambles among the gravestones of a Cincinnati cemetery to track the subtle ways history intersects with individuals. He reminds us, in light-hearted prose, that pride and ambition lead inexorably to oblivion.
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