Nonfiction

January 4, 2011 In the fall of 1979, Bob Cowser Jr. was a nine-year-old baseball enthusiast in a suburb of Martin, Tennessee, when his friend Cary Ann Medlin was abducted, raped, and murdered by a misfit—in the purest, Southern Gothic sense of the word—named Robert Glen Coe. The last time Cowser saw his playmate alive was through the chain link fence of a public swimming pool where he had spent much of his summer. The girl called out his name and asked, “What are you doing here?” In Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, & A Boyhood Between, Cowser, a thoughtful essayist and author of three previous works of creative nonfiction, explores the myriad implications of the question. What is he doing here?

December 30, 2010 Composed, the new memoir by Rosanne Cash, could just as easily be titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Whether James Joyce’s novel served as a template (one of Cash’s favorite words) for it, Composed invites comparisons to Joyce’s coming-of-age masterpiece. Written with grace, generosity, and restraint, the memoir chronicles Cash’s struggle to come to terms with her famous musical pedigree while simultaneously creating an enduring artistic legacy of her own, separate but still threaded to the past. The book appears on Publisher’s Weekly‘s list for Best Nonfiction of 2010.

December 13, 2010 “Since the early 1900s, one question and one question alone has swirled around the largest woodpecker to live in our part of the world,” Knoxville naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales writes in his prologue to Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941. “Is it alive or dead? …. Ivory-bills have attained mythical status because they represent all that is wild and unobtainable and resilient in our natural world.”

December 8, 2010 Memphis likes things a little hotter and a little spicier than Nashville, its sister city to the east. You hear it in the music and you taste it in the food: two things Memphians take very seriously. It’s only right, then, that the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission would publish a cookbook, A Taste of Memphis Music—and it’s only right that its contents would come from Memphis’s legendary music community. In recipes as varied and soulful as the Memphis Sound itself, A Taste of Memphis Music takes would-be chefs down Beale Street, across Main, and into the heart of one of the South’s great food cities.

December 7, 2010 “Nashville has always been a magnet for dreamers, iconoclasts, poets, pickers, and prophets from all over,” the singer/songwriter Marshall Chapman writes in the prologue to her new book, They Came to Nashville, a collection of interviews with noteworthy musicians about their earliest days in Music City. In the book, Chapman sits down to chat with fifteen old chums and close acquaintances, including many who have shared a stage with her.

December 26, 2010 What is the South, and who owns its memory? At the core of the question, renewed in Michael Kreyling’s The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History, is the conflict between an idealized cultural “memory” of the South as it appears in the iconic Gone With the Wind, and the grim, brutal realities of Southern history that haunt the characters of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece, Beloved.