Fiction

September 7, 2010 Jeannette Walls’s first bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle, the shocking chronicle of her own hardscrabble years as the child of frequently homeless parents, is considered by many to be a standard-bearer of the genre—and a tough act to follow. But Walls had an equally captivating tale nestled in her family tree. In 2009’s critically acclaimed Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, she channels her remarkable grandmother’s life in Arizona during the early twentieth century. Jeannette Walls appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on September 8 at 6 p.m. and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 9 at 7 p.m.

September 2, 2010 Nashville writer River Jordan is a literary polymath—she’s a playwright, an essayist, and a novelist with four books under her belt—and her range and ambition are remarkable. While her novels all have a kind of dreamy Southern mysticism, her book of “recollections,” called The Deep Down Dirty South, features stories about people who are “tough as nails, terrible in their mightiness—downright frightful survivors of a hard life.” Her newest novel, The Miracle of Mercy Land, tells the story of a young editorial assistant at a Depression-era newspaper in South Alabama who’s privy to the discovery of a magical book. Jordan will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on September 7 at 7 p.m.

August 27, 2010 When Susan Gregg Gilmore returned to Nashville after thirty years, she turned a novelist’s eye on her own hometown. The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove tells the story of a daughter of privilege—who grows up on what’s left of an antebellum plantation where thoroughbred horses were once raised—at a time of profound social change. Coming of age in a house where a deeply unhappy, alcoholic mother terrorizes not only the servants but her own children, Bezellia struggles to find a way to live in a world where her sole reliable sources of love are the people who are paid to care for her. Susan Gregg Gilmore will read from The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove at Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville on August 28 at 2 p.m.

August 17, 2010 Memphis native Eric Jerome Dickey has been turning out fast-paced, sexy, wildly popular novels since 1996. His latest, Tempted by Trouble, puts a timely twist on the thriller genre with a protagonist driven to crime by the economic downturn. Prior to his book signings this month in Memphis and Nashville, Dickey answered questions from Chapter 16 about the work that goes into his remarkably successful books, and about the mysterious appeal of his violent, morally compromised characters.