A Theory of Love and History
March 21, 2016 Reading Julian Barnes is a paradoxical pleasure: the author makes clear, in book after book, that literature provides no reassurances, no uncanny access to wisdom or happiness, no affirmation to troubled readers—and yet the experience of reading his work is strangely comforting. Now seventy, Barnes keeps exploring profound questions and continues to produce brilliantly conflicting answers. He will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Hall in Nashville on March 23, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
March 17, 2016 Chris Offutt’s father, science-fiction writer Andrew J. Offutt, died in 2013. His eldest son’s inheritance: a massive library of pornography, most of it written by Andrew Offutt himself under a variety of pseudonyms. In My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt delves into his father’s career as the “King of Smut,” as well as his own memories of a haunted, fractured childhood. Offutt will appear at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on March 24, 2016, at 6 p.m.
March 16, 2016 Roy Blount Jr.’s twenty-fourth book, Save Room for Pie, is an eminently readable collection of food writing and humor drawn from his work for magazines and National Public Radio. The Vanderbilt graduate will discuss his new book at the Nashville Public Library on March 22, 2016, at 6:15 p.m.
March 14, 2015 Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, now out in paperback, follows the crew and passengers of the doomed ship, along with their pursuers aboard a German submarine, toward their fateful meeting on May 7, 1915. Larson will discuss the book at the Bijou Theatre in Knoxville on March 26, 2016, at 7 p.m., and at Christian Brothers University in Memphis on April 15, 2016, at 7 p.m.
March 9, 2016 In A Massacre in Memphis, Stephen V. Ash tells the story of three days in May 1866 when white mobs rampaged through communities of newly freed blacks, shaping the history of Memphis and the nation. Ash will discuss the book at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 17, 2016, at 6 p.m.
