A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Little Sam Mountain

Little Sam Mountain

Little Sam Mountain

Charles Fletcher

Parkway Publisher
164 pages
$19.95

Little Sam Mountain follows the life of John Dowdy as he grows up in the mountains of Western North Carolina during the Great Depression. Like so many mountain people, the Dowdys experience great poverty, but they are patriotic and eager to enlist when World War II breaks out. The novel follows John Dowdy as he leaves his sweetheart, Sarah, and his family to go to Europe to fight. When he returns after the war and sees the dramatic changes that have occurred, he is forced to reassess his plans for a life on Little Sam Mountain.

–From the Publisher

The Invasion Year

The Invasion Year

The Invasion Year: An Alan Lewrie Naval Adventure

Dewey Lambdin

Thomas Dunne Books
368 pages
$25.99

“Newcomers to the series will delight in Lambdin’s expert deployment of period detail; his mastery of the details of life on a 19th-century frigate; and the irresistible Captain Alan Lewrie himself. A pleasant blend of light humor, drama and cracking historical naval action.”

Kirkus Reviews

House of Cleaving

House of Cleaving

House of Cleaving

Melissa Newman

Whiskey Creek Press
350 pages
$16.99

As a means to escape painful memories Annie attempts to sell the old Cleaving house, leaving the only home she has ever known. Only then she discovers the botched deed and her only choice, to find her mother’s siblings and convince each to release their claims.From crazy Aunt Veda, who thinks a televangelist is sending her secret love messages, to Uncle Asher who has given up his Wall Street career and joined a hippie commune, Annie is thrust into a bizarre new world where it seems the Cleaving family history has been altered.

–From the Publisher

Now in Print

July 26, 2011 Published as an Amazon ebook in April 2010, D.B. Henson’s mystery, Deed to Death, proved phenomenally successful. By word of tweet, Facebook, blog, and online review, the debut novel sold 100,000 copies and made the Best of 2010 Kindle Customer Favorites list, which includes the likes of Stieg Larson and Laura Lippman. The Nashville author’s success got the attention of uber-agent Noah Lukeman, who offered to represent her. He sold Deed to Death to Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone Books, and the rest is … well, you know the rest. Henson will sign Deed to Death on July 30 at 2 p.m. at Mysteries & More in Nashville. She will also appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 14-16.

Now in Print

Hidden Costs

July 22, 2011 In Silver Sparrow, the third novel from Tayari Jones, a girl named Dana Lynn Yarboro grows up a captive to her parents’ secrets: her father, James Witherspoon, who is married to her mother, has another wife and daughter. From an early age, Dana learns what it means to be an “outside child,” forbidden to tell anyone of her real father. But over time her desire to know her sister, and her desire to be known, gets the best of her, and she begins to pick away at the thin membrane of secrecy that keeps the girls apart. Set in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow is a thoughtful story about bigamy, but it is also a lovely, realistic portrait of two teenage African-American girls, and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Tayari Jones will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

The Uses for Freedom

July 20, 2011 Acclaimed novelist Reynolds Price died on January 20, 2011. Six months later, Robert Cheatham, president of Humanities Tennessee, recalls his former college professor and friend of nearly fifty years and introduces Chapter 16’s publication of an interview he conducted with Price in the 1991 issue of Touchstone magazine. Owing in part to the controversy surrounding a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, their conversation—titled “Censorship, Literature, & Public Education”—focused on the issues of sex and censorship and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.

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