Book Reviews

Memphis author Richard Alley looks at 20th-century Mississippi and Memphis through a photographer’s eyes. Amelia Thorn is a tale of love, loss, and luck.

Children’s entertainer and musician Emily Arrow pens her first picture book with Studio: A Place for Art to Start. Illustrated by The Little Friends of Printmaking, Studio explores the various spaces artists find to create their art.

In Operation Dimwit, the second Penelope Lemon novel from Tennessee native Inman Majors, our plucky protagonist must stare down a suspicious cat, trap a trained skunk, and resist the intimidations of a weirdly competitive gym trainer.

By delving into intimate moments of her characters’ lives, Johnson City writer Shuly Xóchitl Cawood taps a deep well of compassion in her story collection, A Small Thing to Want.

Lost Delta Found, edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, uncovers a long-lost account of the lives and music of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region.

In What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, celebrated poet and memoirist Mark Doty explores the life and prophetic influence of Walt Whitman.