Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Desolation Rowboat

Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree teems with heartbreak, humor, and stunning prose

Cormac McCarthy made his name and fame in the West, but his most enduring character was Knoxville river rat Cornelius Suttree.

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Looking Back on 50 Years of Tennessee Books

50 Books / HT50, Part 4: 1994-1998

Tennessee was connected to some exceptional literary achievements during the second half of the 1990s, including a Pulitzer Prize for poetry awarded to a native son and a legendary journalist’s acclaimed book about the extraordinary young civil rights activists who worked to end segregation in Nashville.

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Looking Back on 50 Years of Tennessee Books

50 Books / HT50, Part 3: 1991-1994

The third installment in our 50 Books / HT50 project features books from the first half of the 1990s, a period that saw the opening of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, a record-breaking blizzard in East Tennessee, and the election of a Tennessean, Al Gore, to the vice presidency.

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A Memphis Story

Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi is an absurd, exuberant, razor-sharp family saga

Steve Stern’s 2010 novel The Frozen Rabbi follows the travels and travails of a Jewish family and their extraordinary heirloom. Stern will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.

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The Vernacular of Beyond

Author and naturalist Janisse Ray advocates for wildness

In books like Wild Spectacle and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Georgia author, naturalist, author, and farmer Janisse Ray communicates profound reverence for the profuse complexity within our world’s ecosystems. Ray will be the keynote speaker at the MTSU Write Conference in Murfreesboro on October 7.

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