Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Poetic Thrills

Erica Wright demonstrates her range with a debut crime novel

July 20, 2015 The protagonist in Erica Wright’s debut crime thriller, The Red Chameleon, is Kathleen Stone, a retired NYPD cop once on the organized-crime beat. At just twenty-five, Stone is already a veritable has-been, a P.I. who now parlays her gift for disguises into spying on marital philanderers and other seemingly less dangerous pursuits. Then she wanders into her client’s murdered husband in an Upper East Side bar. Erica Wright will appear at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015. All festival events are free and open to the public.

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Buried Secrets

In Heroes Are My Weakness, the latest novel by bestselling romance author Susan Phillips, a woman revisits her haunted past in a search for her future

July 17, 2015 Susan Elizabeth Miller’s 2014 novel, newly published in paperback, reads like a Jane Austen novel crossed with a Led Zeppelin song. A prolific, bestselling novelist, Phillips will discuss Heroes Are My Weakness at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 29, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

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Crooked Letters

Ace Atkins discusses The Redeemers, his fifth novel featuring Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson

July 16, 2015 The Redeemers is Ace Atkin’s fifth novel in a suspense series featuring Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson, a truly Southern action hero who seems destined to build a following similar to John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers or C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett. Atkins will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 26, 2015, at 4 p.m.

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Authors in October

Humanities Tennessee previews the 2015 Southern Festival of Books

July 13, 2015 Humanities Tennessee today announces a lineup of award-winning, bestselling authors headlining the twenty-seventh annual Southern Festival of Books, which will be held in Nashville, October 9-11. The roster includes renowned authors Rick Bragg, Geraldine Brooks, Pat Conroy, David Maraniss, Paul Theroux, Rebecca Wells, Scott Westerfeld, and many others.

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The Wisest, and Justest, and Best

Novelist John Pritchard remembers the great journalist John Seigenthaler

July 10, 2015 John Seigenthaler, who died last year on July 11, was perhaps the most central and admirable personality that defined the Nashville I lived in during the 1970s. He was the apotheosis of integrity and of all that was serious and good. Anybody who knew him, even if they were his political opposites, held him in lofty esteem for the moral, thoughtful, and inspiringly intelligent human being he was.

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Backwoods Refrain

Feuding turns mystical and musical in Long Black Curl, the third volume in Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa series

July 9, 2015 In Long Black Curl, the latest installment in Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa series, Appalachian blood feuds recur through the generations like repetitions of an Irish reel. When Bo-Kate Wisby, an exiled daughter of Cloud County, returns home, she initiates a brutal power struggle that will test her entire community. Alex Bledsoe will discuss Long Black Curl at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 18, 2015, at 2 p.m.

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