In Miss Julia Renews Her Vows, the eleventh book of the series, Ann B. Ross gives her heroine about all she can handle. And readers will love every page of the adventure. Ross will appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on April 9 at 7 p.m.
In the summer of 1910, the Charleston police arrested Daniel Cornelius “Nealy” Duncan, a black man, for the murder of a Jewish merchant. In spite of his court-appointed attorney’s Atticus Finch-like efforts, Duncan was found guilty by a kangaroo court and was hanged. By all accounts an upright citizen, Duncan was to be married five days after his alleged crime. He went to his grave calmly declaring his innocence. In Dead Weight, former CBS News producer Batt Humphreys fills the gaps in Duncan’s story. By turns a romance, mystery, courtroom drama, and history lesson, Dead Weight makes the most of its exhaustive research and Humphreys’ seemingly natural ability to spin a nail-biting yarn.
The debut novel from Martin Wilson is a welcome contribution to the small but growing genre of young-adult novels about first love between gay teens. The romance in What They Always Tell Us is wrapped in an authentic portrayal of contemporary, upper-middle-class teenage life. In its portrait of two brothers, the novel also offers an uplifting look at the challenges to—and triumphs of—family loyalty.
Brad Watson‘s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, returns to the post-Faulkner, post-modern South of bleak strip malls, cheap motels, tacky Gulf Coast beaches, and lonely outposts surrounded by murky water, the faint odor of decay, and the ever-present specters of longing and loss. But despite the well-known milieu, these new stories demonstrate a mastery of the surreal that lifts them above the typical conventions of Southern Gothic. Brad Watson will be at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on March 30.
Mullaby, North Carolina, is like many a small Southern town, complete with barbeque joints, eccentrics, and neighbors with long memories. The setting for author Sarah Addison Allen‘s latest novel, The Girl Who Chased the Moon, Mullaby is a place where mysteries are so commonplace the town’s inhabitants have come to view them with an air of blasé acceptance. Allen will be in Nashville to read from her gentle new mystery at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on March 25 at 7 p.m.
Michael Martone has made a literary career out of re-imagining the ordinary, from the landscape of his native Indiana to the college sweatshirt. In anticipation of his reading at APSU on March 31, he answers questions from Chapter 16 about his fascination with place, his relationship with readers, and whether there’s a need for more college creative-writing programs.
