Fiction

July 21, 2010 Cast against the dark history of the 1962 Ole Miss Riot, Steve Yarbrough’s Safe from the Neighbors is both an engrossing mystery novel and a quietly incisive exploration of how even the seemingly remote aspects of our lives are shaped by the tides of history. Steve Yarbrough will give a free public reading at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on July 21 at 8:15 p.m.

July 20, 2010 A physician who has written both medical and crime thrillers (Publisher’s Weekly has characterized her as the “medical suspense queen”), Tess Gerritsen consistently garners reader loyalty and critical acclaim. Her latest book Ice Cold—the eighth featuring characters Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles, the detective and medical examiner who are the basis for TNT’s new drama series Rizzoli & Isles—offers white-hot suspense of the sort Stephen King has publicly admired. Gerritsen will discuss the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on July 20 at 6 p.m.

July 15, 2010 Padgett Powell is a genius of American letters, a brilliant but eccentric writer who looms on the margins of the mainstream. After his first novel, Edisto (1984), won critical praise and an enthusiastic readership, his writing drifted into “surreal lines,” as he describes it, eschewing conventional plot and sympathetic characters for experiments in voice and form. After nine years of silence, Powell has returned with The Interrogative Mood, and readers may once again enjoy his trippy world play and skewed world view. He will give a free public reading at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference on July 18 at 8:15 p.m.

July 12, 2010 With The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, the story of a beautiful young woman accused of killing her father, Sharyn McCrumb returns to the mountains of her Ballad series. Set in rural Virginia in 1935, this is as much an allegory of the contemporary media as the tale of a murder, however. The national press has descended on tiny Wise, Virginia, and the journalists are much more concerned with making the facts fit their own stories than with getting the details straight. McCrumb will discuss the book in four appearances across the state this week; find details in Events.