Fiction

May 27, 2014 “The soul is liquid, and slow to evaporate,” writes Elizabeth McCracken. “The body’s a bucket and liable to slosh. Grieving, haunted, heartbroken, obsessed: your friends will tell you to cheer up. What they really mean is dry up. But it isn’t a matter of will. Only time and light will do the job.” The metaphor is typical of the stories that make up Thunderstruck, a collection of achingly honest, haunting, and often darkly comic tales. McCracken will discuss the book on June 3, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

May 23, 2014 When last seen, Captain Alan Lewrie had suffered a serious leg wound. In Dewey Lambdin’s twentieth series installment, The King’s Marauder, Lewrie must recover and then coax a new commission out of the admiralty. Along the way, as always, he introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters and a wealth of information about the life of a British navy captain during the early years of the nineteenth century.

May 21, 2014 When last we heard from retired Memphis Police Detective Baruch “Buck” Schatz, the hysterical Jewish octogenarian in Daniel Friedman’s 2012 debut novel, Don’t Ever Get Old, he was taking a break from watching Fox News, considering his bowel progress, and smoking Lucky Strikes while an escaped Nazi war criminal tried to kill him. Friedman will discuss the book’s sequel, Don’t Ever Look Back, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on May 27, 2014, at 6 p.m., and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 1, 2014, at 2 p.m.

May 15, 2914 Jennifer Chiaverini continues her portraits of Civil War women in her latest novel, Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival, which features Kate Chase Sprague, the daughter of Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury. Chiaverini will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 22, 2014, at 6 p.m.

May 5, 2914 In 2011, the Robert Parker estate tapped Ace Atkins to continue the late writer’s beloved series of thrillers. With Cheap Shot, his third Spenser novel, Atkins proves again that he is indeed up to the challenge. Atkins will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on May 15, 2014, at 7 p.m.