A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Fiction

Fearless Fighter for an Ignoble Cause

By Maria Browning

The subject of Madison Smartt Bell‘s Devil’s Dream is enough to send a lot of readers—even Bell’s fans—running for the exits. A hefty novel on Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest may not be an alluring prospect, unless you happen to belong to the dwindling cohort of folks who go misty-eyed when they hear “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” From its first paragraphs, however, Devil’s Dream defies expectations, combining meticulous research and vivid accounts of warfare with a complex character study of the South’s dubious hero. On November 20 at 7 p.m., Madison Smartt Bell will discuss Devil’s Dream at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville.

To Justify the Ways of God to Man, 21st-Century Style

By Margaret Renkl

In 2005, William Paul Young was living in a tiny rented house with his wife and six children and working as a “general manager, janitor and inside sales guy” for a friend’s small business. Then he wrote a novel about a man who falls into despair after his young daughter disappears, only to meet God himself—or herself, actually—in the shack where the child was murdered. Life for Young has not been the same. The Shack is now a mega-bestseller, with over 10 million copies in print. On The New York Times list for seventy-six consecutive weeks—forty-nine of them in the number-one slot—the book has been translated into thirty-four languages, selling more than a million copies in Brazil alone. In advance of his Nashville appearance on November 14, Young recently answered a few questions from Chapter 16 about his book.

To Justify the Ways of God to Man, 21st-Century Style

Out of Carolina—But Always Of It

By Adam Prince

Dorothy Allison is an unrelenting realist, steeped in the working-class South. She began her career with the short-story collection Trash (1988), published by the feminist and lesbian press Firebrand Books. Her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina (1992), was a finalist for the National Book Award and continues to be widely read and championed today. Since then she has written a book of essays, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature (1994); a meditation on storytelling, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995); and a second novel, Cavedweller (1998). Each has continued to attract critical success and a large cadre of fans who appreciate her craft and her willingness to write about characters on the margins.

Out of Carolina—But Always Of It

Inventing Tennessee's own Yoknapatawpha County

By Clay Risen

In just over a decade, William Gay has gone from being an unpublished drywall hanger to one of Tennessee’s most acclaimed living writers. Often compared to William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe, Gay was born in 1943 in Hohenwald, Tennessee. After living in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, he returned to his hometown—where he still lives—to work in construction by day and write fiction by night. His first novel, The Long Home, won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. He subsequently published two novels, Provinces of Night and Twilight, and a book of short stories, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down. In 2007 Gay was named a USA Ford Foundation Fellow, and in 2010 he will publish his fourth novel, The Lost Country.

From Memphis to Montpelier

By Faye Jones

Lisa Patton‘s debut novel, Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’easter, is a calorie-free popsicle of a story about a Southern girl out of the pool and into the snow. Vermont might as well be a foreign country to Leelee Satterfield, who has moved there from Memphis with her husband, daughters, and a Yorkie named Princess Grace.

Kindred Souls of Knoxville

By Michael Ray Taylor

R.B. Morris recently received a phone call from his longtime friend and sometime touring partner, the legendary folk singer Steve Earle. Both have published books of poetry as well as music, and both share a deep interest in the writer James Agee. Earle explained that he had been asked to write a forward for a new edition of A Death in Family, Agee’s Pulitzer-winning novel based on his own boyhood in the Ft. Sanders section of Knoxville, the place—not coincidentally—where Morris grew up.

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