A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Starting with a Footnote

February 2, 2011 Wilberforce University, near Xenia, Ohio, is one of the nation’s oldest historically black universities, the first to be owned and operated by African Americans. Behind its founding in 1863 is a fascinating yet all-but-forgotten piece of history: the school stands on what was once the site of Tawawa Resort, a place where Southern slaveholders vacationed, often in the company of their enslaved mistresses. It’s this setting that Dolen Perkins-Valdez imagines as the backdrop for her engrossing debut novel, Wench, which Publishers’ Weekly called “heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful.”

Starting with a Footnote

Her Postage Stamp of Native Soil

January 24, 2011 Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the setting of Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, is a tiny town nestled in the swampy, piney depths of the Gulf Coast, where few leave and solid jobs are fewer still. It is a world that Ward, currently writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, knows intimately. Her deep empathy for the people of this place, and her attentiveness to its landscape, make the book a stirring, evocative portrait of two brave young African-American men who ask for little beyond the love and support of their maternal grandmother, Ma-mee. Ward will read at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus on January 25 at 7 p.m.

Her Postage Stamp of Native Soil

Going Native

January 18, 2011 Talismans is a series of short stories that, not unlike photos in an album, work together to tell a larger tale. Written by Sybil Baker, an English professor at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, these brief snapshots center on Elise, the daughter of a church organist and a Vietnam vet, whose early suburban life is a quagmire of sexual experimentation and social unease. Eventually, Elise drifts to Southeast Asia, where she searches for a connection: to her late father, her lovers, her fellow travelers, and eventually to the local culture and the land itself.

Valuable Artifacts

January 3, 2010 Richard Bausch is the author of nineteen books of fiction, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, The Last Good Time, and Peace; and the short-story collections Spirits, The Fireman’s Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and his newest book, Something Is Out There. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. In 1995 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He currently holds the Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at The University of Memphis.

Big Enough to Block Out the Sun

December 29, 2010 At 185 pages, Michael Knight’s new novel, The Typist, could easily be considered a novella or even a long story—unsurprising, given that Knight has earned his greatest acclaim as an author of short stories. But despite its brevity, The Typist encompasses a variety of richly drawn characters, themes, and emotions typically associated with much longer, denser, more ostensibly “ambitious” novels. In this small book, Knight manages to veer through a variety of complications involving love, betrayal, black-market intrigue, and political maneuvering, all set against the backdrop of Japan’s national humiliation during the occupation years following World War II. The book appears on The Huffington Post‘s top-ten list of the best novels of 2010.

Hebrew Lessons

December 27, 2010 Rummaging through the family deep freeze, fifteen-year-old Bernie Karp finds pork tenderloins and an ancient rabbi frozen in a block of ice. The rabbi’s journey from nineteenth-century Poland to freezer and beyond—and his effect on those he meets—is the stuff of Memphis native Steve Stern’s latest novel, The Frozen Rabbi, a hilarious, poignant romp through the Jewish diaspora to the very firmament itself. The book is on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s list of best books for 2010.

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