Fiction

February 19, 2014 A delight from beginning to end, Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now is filled with unlikely characters whose pain and longing are so real that readers celebrate each small step they take toward something like wholeness. As Quick’s protagonist, Bartholomew Neil, says, “Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t. And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?” Matthew Quick will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

February 18, 2014 Elizabeth Spencer’s story collection, Starting Over, explores the exquisite tension between husbands and wives, parents and children, familial belonging and the yearning of the individual heart. Spencer has published seven previous story collections, and she won the first of her five O. Henry prizes in 1960. She is, by any measure, a master of the form, and the stories in Starting Over show all the deftness and insight for which she has long been known.

February 12, 2014 North Carolina-based author Wiley Cash garnered widespread praise for his 2012 debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, which explored a small town’s dark secret through multiple narrators. He returns to the technique in his new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, a short, gripping thriller in which the action unfolds via four very different voices, against the backdrop of the 1998 home-run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. Cash will discuss and sign This Dark Road to Mercy at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on February 17, 2014, at 6 p.m.

February 10, 2014 A story of love, betrayal, and the gaping hole left in a family by the unresolved disappearance of a loved one, Laura Lippman’s After I’m Gone is a reminder that a well-done mystery novel is as great a work of art as any piece of literature. Lippman will discuss After I’m Gone at the Nashville Public Library on February 12, 2014, at 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

January 30, 2014 “Elspeth Howell was a sinner.” Thus begins James Scott’s harrowing debut novel, The Kept, in which Elspeth is made to pay a hefty price for her sins: after a long foot journey through snow, she returns home to find her husband and four of her five children murdered. Rendered in delicate, measured prose that makes the unfolding of weighty truths and painful discoveries all the more resonant, The Kept is a provocative hybrid of period suspense thriller and domestic literary novel. James Scott will appear in conversation with Jamie Quatro at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 3, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.