Andrew Maraniss spent eight years researching and writing Strong Inside, the story of Vanderbilt basketball player Perry Wallace, who broke the color barrier in SEC athletics. Now Maraniss has produced a version of the story for readers in middle and high school. He will launch the new edition at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 9 at 6:30 p.m.
In 1925 a young man from Knoxville named Paul Adams established the first permanent camp atop Mt. Le Conte, the highest peak in what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Editors Ken Wise and Anne Bridges have now updated Adams’s memoir, Mount Le Conte, first published fifty years ago, as a follow-up to Smoky Jack, which was published posthumously last year.
With The Story of Charlotte’s Web and The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Michael Sims invented what amounts to a new genre: the biography of a particular book. In Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, he follows literary and historical clues to identify the origins of the most famous fictional detective in the world.
Novelist Adam Ross, the first new editor of The Sewanee Review since 1973, will launch the storied literary magazine’s redesign on January 31. In it, there’s enough transgression to satisfy the spirit of Tennessee Williams, whose bequest supports the Review’s publication.
Acclaimed poet Joy Harjo’s most recent collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, delivers the exquisite mix of beauty, transcendence, and pain her work is known for. Harjo joined the creative-writing faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville this year and will give a free public reading at UT’s Hodges Library on January 23 at 7 p.m.
In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—poet, novelist, and playwright—tells the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, but it is also wholly the story of Lightman himself as he struggles to understand his own place as a white, Jewish man in the segregated South.
