A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Death-Defying Feats

In Chloe Benjamin’s dazzling new novel, four siblings set down an uneasy path after a fortune teller reveals the dates on which each one of them will die. Benjamin will discuss The Immortalists at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

Suffused with Color and Light and Personality

At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

Setting Fire to Jim Crow

Starting from an actual 1967 forum featuring South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Martin Luther King Jr., activist Stokely Carmichael, and beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Gerald Duff’s Nashville Burning looks at three consecutive Aprils of violence and change at Vanderbilt and other parts of the Music City.

Remembering the Ghost

The Unquiet Grave, Sharyn McCrumb’s latest historical novel, is based on a true story, chronicling the notorious trial of a horse-stealing blacksmith accused of strangling his third wife to death in 1897.

So Let Me Burn

With virtuosic lyricism and the striking juxtaposition of religious and erotic obsession, Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon delivers an unforgettable and astonishingly original portrait of the moral and psychological consequences of unfaithfulness. Quatro will discuss Fire Sermon at Arts Build in Chattanooga on January 11 and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 6.

The Asset

Mark Greaney’s famous assassin, Court Gentry, is back in Agent in Place. This time he’s working on behalf of a group of Syrian expats to secure the Syrian president’s mistress so they can use her to bring down the president’s regime. But the expats’ plan goes awry when it’s discovered the mistress has a baby–the Syrian president’s only male heir–hidden away in a Damascus safe house. Agent in Place will be published on February 20, 2018.

Visit the Fiction archives chronologically below or search for an article

TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING