Fiction

October 12, 2015 Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last takes the very real ills and absurdities of the early twenty-first century—economic recession, for-profit prisons, gated communities, loss of privacy, technology-fueled narcissism, etc.—and gives them the signature Atwood tweak into the realm of speculative fiction. The issues it takes on are serious, but the story itself is a sexy, bitterly comic romp. Atwood will discuss The Heart Goes Last at the Nashville Public Library on October 19, 2015, at 6:15 p.m.

October 6, 2015 Drawn from real-life World War II experiences of women who reported from the front lines, Meg Waite Clayton’s The Race for Paris documents the events of the summer of 1944, when the world anxiously awaited news of the liberation of France. Clayton will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

October 6, 2015 In the latest installment of his bestselling Penn Cage series, Greg Iles explores the many unsolved murders of African Americans in the years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Iles will appear on October 10, 2015, at noon in Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium. The event, part of the Southern Festival of Books, is free and open to the public.

October 5, 2015 In Sweetland, Newfoundland poet and novelist Michael Crummey has crafted a moving tale of mortality, both communal and individual. He will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.

October 5, 2015 The narrator of Geraldine Brooks’s The Secret Chord faces a formidable task: an order from King David to write an unvarnished chronicle of the flawed man behind the crown. Geraldine Brooks will discuss The Secret Chord at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.