Book Reviews

With Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton, musicologist Lydia Hamessley gives long-overdue consideration to Parton’s formidable body of work as a songwriter.

In Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen, a collection of essays edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar, 18 writers explore images they wished they’d looked away from — but didn’t.

In The Ballad of Ami Miles, debut novelist Kristy Dallas Alley pens a coming-of-age story against a backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America where few women can still bear children.

Dispatches from the Race War, a new essay collection by antiracist educator Tim Wise, implores white Americans to reckon with the nation’s ongoing racial traumas and commit to the struggle for justice and equity. Wise will appear at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on December 10.

In Together in a Sudden Strangeness, editor Alice Quinn gathers more than a hundred poets, whose consummate skill and invaluable insight shed light on the unprecedented experiences of the coronavirus pandemic.

In Via Negativa, the debut novel by Memphis writer Daniel Hornsby, a homeless priest and a wounded coyote travel across America on a quest for reconciliation and revenge.