February 9, 2011 In her first novel, When We Were Strangers, Knoxvillian Pamela Schoenewaldt tells the story of Irma Vitale, a young Italian woman who comes to America, as all immigrants do, in the hope of making a better life for herself. The book is a vivid account of not only Irma’s own story but also that of America itself. Pamela Schoenewaldt will discuss When We Were Strangers at 7 p.m. on February 10 at Borders Books in Nashville.
February 7, 2011 In the world we wake up to every day, even when the sight of a body in pain is riveting, the image nevertheless arouses a compulsive cringe. But what if we woke up instead to a world in which bodily trauma was somehow made, literally, beautiful? In The Illumination, novelist Kevin Brockmeier imagines a world in which all pain glimmers and shines, transforming the very nature of suffering. Brockmeier will read from and discuss The Illumination at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on February 7 at 6 p.m.
February 3, 2011 Philip Stephens’s debut novel, Miss Me When I’m Gone, is a brilliant quest narrative featuring two protagonists, one light and one dark, who move through a landscape where the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez operates in a setting that evokes William Faulkner and with a soundtrack that could have come straight out of Willie Nelson’s fever dreams. Stephens will read from Miss Me When I’m Gone at Borders Books in Nashville on February 5 at 2 p.m.
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.”
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.
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.
