Fiction

September 30, 2010 Peter Ho Davies is author of the acclaimed novel The Welsh Girl, as well as two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has been much anthologized and has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among other publications. In 2003, Granta magazine included Davies on its top-twenty list, “Best of Young British Novelists.” He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and, in 2008, was a recipient of the Pen/Malamud Award. He took questions from Chapter 16 prior to his Nashville appearance at 7 p.m. on September 30 in Vanderbilt University’s Buttrick Hall, Room 203.

September 23, 2010 In 2008, Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award—a coup for its author and for its publisher, the tiny, nonprofit Gray Wolf Press. The NBA distinction helped propel sales of the novel, which has become a favorite of book clubs. Scibona’s burgeoning career received another boost in June, when The New Yorker named Scibona to its “20 Under 40” list of young writers who are bringing fresh voices to American fiction. Scibona will read from his work at 7 p.m. on September 23 in Buttrick Hall, Room 102, on the Vanderbilt University campus.

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.