Fiction

September 6, 2013 Tara Conklin’s debut novel, The House Girl, revolves around the legacy of Josephine Bell, a long-dead artist who lived as a house slave on a Virginia tobacco farm. By interweaving Josephine’s story with the path of the researcher trying to uncover that buried history, the novel confronts the question of whether it’s ever truly possible to restore what’s been ruptured by time and injustice. Conklin will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013. All festival events are free and open to the public.

September 5, 2013 In Night Film, Marisha Pessl convincingly imagines the duplicitous world of a movie director named Stanislas Cordova, whose infamous films terrorize viewers. In this novel loaded with deception, misperception, and outright terror, the mysterious death of Cordova’s daughter propels a journalist into the dark corners of movies and the human mind. Pessl will appear at the Nashville Public Library at 6:15 p.m. on September 12, 2013, as part of the Salon@615 series.