Michael Martone has made a literary career out of re-imagining the ordinary, from the landscape of his native Indiana to the college sweatshirt. In anticipation of his reading at APSU on March 31, he answers questions from Chapter 16 about his fascination with place, his relationship with readers, and whether there’s a need for more college creative-writing programs.
In 1977, Laura Bell—who grew up in Nashville—traveled to Wyoming for a short visit and never left. Her memoir, Claiming Ground, can more than hold its own against any survivor narrative of failed love and misplaced ambition, against any epic quest for understanding and mercy, and in language so tempered, spare, and beautiful that it rivals any poem’s. In the context of celebrity tell-alls and fabricated survivor narratives, literary worth is only rarely the measure of a memoir’s success, but if ever a book deserved to be a bestseller, Claiming Ground surely does. Laura Bell will discuss her memoir at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on March 31 at 7 p.m.
By Michael Lewis
Norton
352 pages
$13.95
“Lewis has made a habit of writing about sport recently, but sport is really only a subtext for a much more meaningful examination of class and race. I wept at the end, something I have not done at the end of a work of non-fiction for a very long time.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, The Observer Books of the Year 2006
By Robert B. Talisse
Cambridge University Press
216 pages
$90
“Robert Talisse has provided us with a timely, original, and unapologetic defense of constitutional democracy. It is, he says, the only form of government suited to persons who are already committed in their everyday lives to giving reasons for their beliefs. Artfully blending careful philosophical analysis with contemporary illustrations and accessible prose, Democracy and Moral Conflict makes an authentically democratic and powerfully reasoned case for democracy.”
—John C. P. Goldberg, Professor of Law, Harvard University
By Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler
Cambridge University Press
246 pages
$24.99
“What makes this book genuinely impressive is that it remains grounded at all times in hard empirical evidence while simultaneously advancing provocative arguments about America’s political conflicts (including a certain-to-be-controversial chapter devoted to the role which authoritarianism played in the Clinton/Obama war). … I really recommend this book.”
—Glenn Greenwald, Salon
By the Editors of The Bark
Rodale
192 pages
$16.99
“Sometimes the best moments in human relationships are the ones in which we have the self-restraint to say nothing at all, to demonstrate our love and our joy instead of trying to break down the experience and reshape it into words. This is the genius of dogs, one of the many geniuses of dogs—they have the nonverbal-expression thing down cold. And if we’re reading too much into everything they’re not saying, then so be it. They’ll forgive us. They always do.”
—Ann Patchett, from the foreword to Dog Joy
