An Education and a Love Story
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.
Nonfiction
Monumental Resistance
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.
Humble, Selfless, Indefatigable
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.
Slavery in Motion
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.
Relax and Enjoy the Ride
In Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run, Lawrence Wells and Dean Faulkner Wells offer readers an enjoyable ride of their own through a collaborative collection of short pieces written between 1978 and Dean’s death in 2011. Lawrence Wells will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on August 22 and the 2026 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 17-18.
Rampage on the Fringes
In Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution, Katherine Grandjean recounts the little-known history of a pair of homicidal brothers on the Tennessee and Kentucky frontiers during America’s volatile early years.
