Reckoning with Mystery
October 8, 2013 Hattie Shepherd, the woman at the center of Ayana Mathis’s debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie—made famous as the first selection of Oprah’s Book Club 2.0—has survived the Jim Crow South, a decades-long struggle with poverty, and life as the mother of eleven children. Today Mathis talks with Chapter 16 about Hattie’s complicated character. Mathis 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.
October 7, 2013 With Doomed—the sequel to 2011’s Damned—Chuck Palahniuk brings Madison Spencer back from hell to roam the earth as a specter, haunting the ex-schoolmates who once tormented her and the insufferable parents who ignored her, ultimately finding herself at the center of yet another diabolical plot by the Evil One. Chuck Palahniuk will discuss Doomed at the twenty-fifth annual 
October 3, 2013 In Local Souls, Allan Gurganus offers up a trio of comic novellas set in fictional Falls, North Carolina, a twenty-first-century village where the insular coziness of small-town life is being diminished by newcomers, digital communication, and natural calamity. Gurganus will appear at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013.
October 2, 2013 Much of The Frozen Rabbi by award-winning author Steve Stern takes place in the Pinch, a long ignored Memphis neighborhood that was once the city’s Jewish ghetto. The Pinch’s rich and conflicted history provides the ideal locus for the book, which is a tale of shamanistic self-interest and tradition gone wrong. Steve Stern will appear at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on October 3, 2013, in Buttrick Hall, Room 101, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
September 30, 2013 The Tilted World, by poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, is a novel set against the great Mississippi flood of 1927. In the book, their first literary collaboration, male and female protagonists speak in alternating chapters to create a story of both brutal action and satisfying romance. Fennelly and Franklin will appear at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on October 4, 2013, at 5 p.m., and at the twenty-fifth annual Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 11-13, 2013.
September 26, 2013 Sylvie, the teenaged narrator of John Searles’s searing third novel, Help for the Haunted, awakes to the sound of the gunshots that killed her parents. Left in the care of her older sister, she works to piece together what happened that night—endangering her own life along the way. Searles, author of the bestselling mysteries Boy Still Missing and Strange but True, 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.