July 5, 2012 In a culture filled with so-called food porn, it’s perhaps surprising that Nashville’s Alimentum: The Literature of Food is the country’s first literary journal dedicated exclusively to themes of table, kitchen, market, and sustenance. In its pages—and in a revamped website, launching today—editor Paulette Licitra invites readers to consider food as a savory (or sweet) organizing principle, which writers can apply to themes as wide as human experience itself.
July 3, 2012 Sapphire’s first novel, Push (on which the Oscar-winning film Precious was based), centers on an abused African-American teenager’s second pregnancy with her own father’s child. Sapphire’s second novel, The Kid, is about that kid: her second child. Sapphire will read from the book, newly released in paperback, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 10 at 6:30 p.m. She answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to the event.
June 20, 2012 The war is over, Lincoln has been assassinated, all slaves are officially free, and the South is in turmoil: with so many hopes and expectations, so many frustrations and resentments, this is fertile ground in which to plant a novel. In Freeman, Leonard Pitts Jr. makes the most of this setting’s potential for conflict. The book’s main characters include Sam Freeman, a self-educated former slave who escaped to the North fifteen years earlier and is now determined to go back and find his wife; and Prudence Cafferty Kent, a privileged young war widow from Boston with a plan to educate former slaves in the South.
June 11, 2012 Russ Kick’s The Graphic Canon: Volume One: From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liasons is the first book in a three-volume series featuring the work of dozens of graphic artists addressing the landmarks of world literature. The results are, as the saying goes, mixed—but not in a bad way. The Graphic Canon is a glorious mash-up of not only words and images, but also high and low culture, the popular and the paradigmatic. Kick will discuss The Graphic Canon at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on June 14 at 6 p.m.
June 8, 2012 In his twenty-ninth thriller, bestselling novelist Jeffery Deaver gives readers triple or quadruple their money: XO includes more twists, turns, and doglegs than an East Tennessee back road, and Deaver pairs the book with an album of country songs, as well. Just when you think you’ve finally hit the mystery’s straightaway, there’s another series of hairpins in your path. On June 12 at 6:30 p.m., Deaver will discuss XO at Parnassus Books in Nashville. On June 13 at 7 p.m., he will answer questions and sign copies of the book at Barnes & Noble in Knoxville.
June 7, 2012 In the years since the publication of Independence Day (1995)—the first novel ever to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize—Richard Ford has achieved rare and lofty status as a cherished American institution, regarded mostly as a gifted chronicler of fin-de-siècle suburban angst in the tradition of Cheever, Updike, Richard Yates, and Ford’s fellow Mississippian Walker Percy. Richard Ford will discuss his new book, Canada, at the Nashville Public Library on June 14. The event is part of the Salon@615 series and will begin with a reception at 6:15 p.m. Both the reception and the reading are free and open to the public.
