Fiction

November 18, 2014 Frankie, the young heroine of Brandy Wilson’s Prohibition-era novel, The Palace Blues, comes from respectable folks who expect her to marry a nice boy, but she has no interest in respectability, and she’d rather pass for a boy than marry one. When she falls in love with Jean Bailey, a beautiful blues singer, she begins a journey that leaves her family and respectability far behind.

November 13, 2014 David James Poissant’s delicately crafted stories of human longing and loss have earned him comparisons to Richard Ford and Anton Chekhov. In his debut collection, The Heaven of Animals, Poissant paints a broad canvas populated by a memorable cast of hard-luck cases. He will appear at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library in Knoxville on November 17, 2014, at 7 p.m.

November 10, 2014 In Garth Stein’s new novel, A Sudden Light, fourteen-year-old Trevor and his father head west during a time of family crisis. In a fight over the fate of Riddell House, the crumbling mansion built from their family’s timber fortune, conflicting agendas of both the dead and the living come to light. Stein, the bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain, will discuss A Sudden Light at the Nashville Public Library on November 14, 2014, at 6:15 p.m.