Octopus is popular in cuisines around the world, creating a level of demand that naturally inspires interest in farming it — but that’s easier said than done, as Richard Schweid explains in Life on the Octopus Farm. Schweid will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
Emilee Hackney’s debut All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir traces her journey from Virginia’s coal country to Harvard, intertwining her own story with those of people and places often overlooked by the powerful. Hackney will appear at the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
Chris Young’s The Wound Is Where the Light Enters: A Memoir of Resilience shows us what it’s like to grow up in poverty, land in prison, and survive to find love and redemption.
In Memphis, Confederate statues and cotton festivals built the notion of a “Lost Cause,” a myth of the South that cast the Civil War as a glorious, holy, doomed crusade. In A Fight for Visibility, historian Donna Reeves details how Black Memphians challenged these public spaces and rituals, establishing their own vision of the past.
In The Apostle of Tennessee, Joe Pagetta chronicles the work of a 19th-century Catholic priest who spent 25 years traveling Middle and West Tennessee, building churches and serving the state’s growing Catholic population. Joe Pagetta will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 19, the Tennessee State Museum on September 12, and the 2026 Southern Festival of Books on October 17-18.
In Moving Toward Freedom, Susan O’Donovan invites a more complex understanding of how enslaved Black people defined their freedom, based on their surprisingly mobile lives. O’Donovan will be in conversation with Charles McKinney at Novel in Memphis on August 25.
