Fiction

January 28, 2014 Threadgill Pickett, the 114-year-old protagonist of Charles McNair’s novel Pickett’s Charge, is the last surviving Confederate soldier. Roused from his Alabama rest home by a mysterious visitation from his long-dead brother, Threadgill sets out on a long trek to Bangor, Maine, where he plans to kill the last surviving Union solider. Absurdity and tragedy follow Threadgill wherever he goes, and revenge begins to seem a tougher, stranger business than he’d anticipated. McNair will appear at Howlin’ Books in Nashville on January 30, 2014, at 6 p.m.

January 15, 2014 In Okey Ndibe’s new novel, Foreign Gods, Inc., a Nigerian-American on the brink of bankruptcy decides to steal the war god from his African village and sell it to a Manhattan art dealer. This scheme leads him into the middle of religious and political conflicts that force him to decide where his deepest loyalties lie. Ndibe will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 19, 2014, at 2 p.m.

January 8, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling 2004 novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is set against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil-rights movement. In The Invention of Wings Kidd turns the clock back further—to the slave-holding South prior to the Civil War. Kidd will discuss the book at 6:15 p.m. on January 15, 2014, at the Nashville Public Library, as part of the Salon@615 series.