Fiction

January 26, 2012 Despite the science-fiction origin of its title, the nine stories in Thomas P. Balázs’s debut collection, Omicron Ceti III, offer journeys into dark and quite disparate corners of this very real world. Wide-ranging in subject, the stories are linked by their characters’ fumbling, consuming desire for connection, and by the comic qualities that Balázs deftly draws out of their lonely and sometimes painful circumstances. Balázs will read from Omicron Ceti III in Chattanooga on January 29, 3 p.m., at Winder Binder Books, and on February 20, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Federation.

January 25, 2012 Kim Edwards’s debut novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, sold more than four million copies in the United States alone and spent 122 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Edwards answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to her appearance at “Literacy is Key: A Book & Author Affair” on January 26 at 10 a.m. at the University of Memphis. The program will also feature remarks by Lisa Patton, author of Yankee Doodle Dixie, and Ace Atkins, author of The Ranger, and proceeds will support both Literacy Mid-South and Reading is Fundamental. For information and tickets, please click here.

January 19, 2012 When We Were Strangers, the debut novel of Knoxvillian Pamela Schoenewaldt, captures the risk and struggle of nineteenth-century immigration through the experience of a young Italian woman, Irma Vitale. Schoenewaldt will read from When We Were Strangers on January 23 at the Hodges Library on the Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee. She will be joined by Marina Maccari-Clayton of the UT History Department, whose specialty is Italian-American immigration history.

January 18, 2012 Despite being turned down by dozens of agents, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus went on to become a bestseller and was published in more than thirty countries. Summit Entertainment, the production company behind the Twilight series, bought film rights, as Morgenstern found herself the star of a real-life fairy tale. Erin Morgenstern will discuss and sign copies of The Night Circus on January 26 at 6:15 p.m. at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.

January 12, 2012 Since her auspicious debut at age twenty-eight with the short-story collection Self-Help, Lorrie Moore has become one of America’s most revered and imitated authors of literary fiction. The recipient of countless awards and honors, including the International Fiction Prize for Birds of America, Moore is among the most influential practitioners of the short-story form. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Lorrie Moore will appear at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 19 at 4:30 p.m. She answered questions from Chapter 16 via email prior to the event.