Two Cups of Joe
Roots Music in America and Lucky Joe’s Namesake, two new volumes from the University of Tennessee Press, collect the late folklorist Joe Wilson’s idiosyncratic writings on music, history, and life.
Nonfiction
Redefining the Story of the South
A cast of visionaries and eccentrics populates The Potlikker Papers, from Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Freedom Farm and Pig Bank, to Edna Lewis, who could tell when a cake was done by listening to it.
Thriller City
Holly Tucker’s City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris tells a fascinating true tale of murder, torture, and intrigue in seventeenth-century Paris—and explains how the City of Light got a nickname that has persisted for centuries. Tucker will discuss the book at Star Line Books in Chattanooga on June 8 on 4 p.m.
A Satisfying Journey
In a new collection of essays, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, poet and inveterate traveler Richard Tillinghast revisits some of the locales that have spoken most profoundly to him, recalling his own experiences and exploring the history and culture that make each one unique.
Where Music and Sports Converge
Chuck Klosterman X collects some of the journalist’s writing about sports, music, and topics as disparate as zombies and steroids in a book the subtitle describes as “A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century.” Klosterman will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. on May 23.
“Once His Country’s Idol, Now Her Horror”
Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution is a grand adventure into the darkness of the human heart, the story of a man whose name is synonymous with “traitor.” Philbrick will discuss and sign Valiant Ambition at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 16 at 7 p.m.
