Nonfiction

Alice Bolin’s essay collection, Dead Girls, is a savvy mix of cultural critique, coming-of-age diary, and confessions of a pop-culture fangirl. Bolin will read at Novel in Memphis on September 20, at The Bookshop in Nashville on September 23, and at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

With The Thin Light of Freedom, Edward L. Ayers casts new light on the Civil War through the experience of two communities—one Northern, one Southern—occupied by enemy armies made up of their former countrymen. Ayers will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

Glen David Gold’s vibrant memoir, I Will Be Complete, tracks the 1970s, from fashion trends to punk bands, while probing psychic scars inflicted by his mother, a ravishing “Linda Evans”-like Englishwoman transplanted to the West Coast. Gold will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

When she died, Zora Neale Hurston left behind a manuscript that tells the story of the last living survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. The editor of the book, titled Barracoon, is the Hurston scholar Deborah Plant who will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 in Nashville.

Tim Samaras, writes Brantley Hargrove in The Man Who Caught the Storm, “accomplished meteorology’s equivalent to the moon landing.” Hargrove will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

In her memoir, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, Nell Painter writes about learning to see art, and herself, in new ways. Painter will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.