A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Fiction

Fantine's Folly

By Susannah Felts

October 18, 2010 Traversing both the gentrified pockets and gangstaland of Los Angeles, as well as the sugar-cane fields and sweltering swampland of Louisiana, Susan Straight’s new novel is a complex work of art. Take One Candle Light a Room offers exquisitely rendered settings, lyrical prose, and a formidably large cast of characters. Its narrator, Fantine Antoine, an African American of Louisiana Creole descent and California birth, is an accomplished travel writer, but in this book she undertakes a journey unlike any she has experienced before—one that stands to alter her path permanently. Straight will read from the book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 18 at 6 p.m.

Carrying the Fire

By Ed Tarkington

October 7, 2010 Since 1993, the Swedish Academy has spurned writers from the U.S. as “too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.” But just yesterday, British bookies were giving better than three-to-one odds that this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature would go to Tennessee native Cormac McCarthy. We know why.

Captive Audience

By Sean Kinch

October 6, 2010 Laura Lippman’s new crime novel, I’d Know You Anywhere, begins where most mysteries end. The killer has been caught and incarcerated; apparently, justice has been served. Twenty years after he raped and murdered a series of young women in suburban Washington, D.C., Walter Bowman sits on Death Row awaiting execution, his appeals finally exhausted. His last request is to make contact with the one girl he kidnapped but, unlike the unfortunate others, did not kill. Lippman will read from the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 7 at 6 p.m.

Enter the Dragon

By Paul V. Griffith

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.

Enter the Dragon

Angels in the Outback

By Lacey Galbraith

September 29, 2010 Vampires, zombies, and now angels: ever since Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight became the twenty-first century’s gold standard by which young adult romances are measured, publishing houses have been trying to hit upon the next soul-mates-and-supernatural YA love story. And thanks to Alexandra Adornetto’s Halo, the angels angle just might stick. Adornetto will read from the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 1 at 4 p.m.

Feeding the Hope Machine

By Sean Kinch

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.

Feeding the Hope Machine

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