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.
To writers and scholars who have followed his career for decades, Cormac McCarthy is as notorious for his perceived reclusiveness as for his astonishing body of work. With Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King takes a deep dive into the McCarthy Archive at Texas State University and emerges with a lucid account of McCarthy’s transition from Tennessee to the Southwest.
Holly Tucker’s most recent nonfiction title, Blood Work, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. The Nashville author’s new work of nonfiction, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris, will be released on March 21. Today we bring you the book’s opening pages.
Michael Sims’s new book of nonfiction, Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, will be released on January 24, 2017. Today Chapter 16 readers have a sneak peek at the first chapter.
Set against the history of one of the quintessential ‘80s alternative rock bands, Lol Tolhurst’s memoir, Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, tells an engaging tale of transformation and redemption. Tolhurst will sign copies of Cured at Howlin’ Books in Nashville on December 8 at 6 p.m., and at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on December 11 at 2 p.m.
