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.
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 14, 2010 The Browns were trailblazers of the “Nashville Sound,” massively successful crossover artists who, from 1955 to 1967, amassed dozens of hits and a slate of music-industry nominations and awards. At the peak of their popularity, the Browns outsold even their old friend Elvis. Their signature hit, “The Three Bells,” sold over a million copies and has since been covered by a variety of artists, from Ray Charles and Roy Orbison to Alison Krauss & Union Station. But, despite their success, the Browns are all but anonymous today, barely remembered even by music aficionados. Bestselling author Rick Bass tells their story in a new novel called Nashville Chrome.
September 13, 2010 In the hands of a less subtle writer, the premise of M.O. Walsh’s new collection of stories, The Prospect of Magic, could easily have resulted in hopeless kitsch. When the owner of The World Famous Ploofop Travelling Carnival dies suddenly, the carnies and circus acts find themselves stuck in Fluker, Louisiana, and forced to learn to live straight. What keeps these tales from devolving into material for a bad sitcom is the care with which Walsh details his characters’ inner turmoil. M.O. Walsh will read from his work at the Hodges Library on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on September 13 at 7 p.m.
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.
