Susan Minot’s vivid new novel imagines a Ugandan rebel group’s abduction of thirty adolescent girls
March 24, 2014 Susan Minot’s new novel, Thirty Girls, is based on the 1996 kidnapping of Ugandan schoolgirls by warlord Joseph Kony and his army. Minot will join fiction writer Lorrie Moore in a joint reading at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy on March 29, 2014, at 4 p.m. This event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.
Prior to her Memphis appearance, Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber talks with Chapter 16 about the pleasures of reading and the value of the humanities
March 20, 2014 Marjorie Garber believes that the way we read Shakespeare’s plays tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the Bard himself. In an interview with Chapter 16, Garber discusses her approach to Shakespeare, her love of literature, and her commitment to intellectual speculation. She will speak at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 27, 2014, at 7 p.m. Her talk, “Occupy Shakespeare: Shakespeare and/in the Humanities,” is free and open to the public.
Ted Scofield’s debut novel, Eat What You Kill, is a philosophical thriller
March 13, 2014 Evan Stoess spends twelve years as the only poor kid at a prep school for the overprivileged, an experience that offers incentive aplenty for him to strive for wealth, to prove he’s worthy of his peers—better, even. What is Evan willing to do for wealth and fame? That’s the central question of Eat What You Kill, a financial thriller by former Nashvillian Ted Scofield.
In Bill Cotter’s Parallel Apartments, a cast of outcasts and misfits attempt to re-assemble their lives
March 13, 2014 Bill Cotter’s new novel, Parallel Apartments, set mainly in Austin, centers on three generations of women whose lives have been upended by unplanned pregnancies. This densely peopled novel is replete with outrageous events intended to provoke and titillate, but at its heart it explores the nature of desire and the consequences of dubious decisions. Bill Cotter will read from Parallel Apartments at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 18, 2014, at 6 p.m.
Alan M. Clark digs into history and horror in The Door That Faced West
March 11, 2014 In his new novel, The Door That Faced West, author and illustrator Alan M. Clark digs into the history and horror of the early Tennessee wilderness. It’s a dark story that unearths an even darker landscape in the minds of his characters.
Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel puts an unusual spin on family dysfunction
February 26, 2014 Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the 2014 Nashville Reads book selection, is interested in memory and language and story, perhaps because Rosemary has been struggling with the story of her own life since she was five years old, when her unusual sister Fern disappeared, inflicting a trauma so deep that neither Rosemary nor her family has ever fully recovered. The Nashville Reads Kickoff event, “Drop Everything and Read,” will be held March 3, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library at 2 p.m. Guest readers include Mayor Karl Dean, novelist Ann Patchett, and songwriter Janis Ian, among others. Refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.
