March 29, 2016 Written from a perspective shaped by a passionate, unorthodox sympathy for dogs, Vanderbilt University professor Colin Dayan’s With Dogs at the Edge of Life explores the troubling contradictions in the human-canine relationship.
March 24, 2016 Alan Taylor won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes in History for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. On March 31, 2016, at 6 p.m. at the University Center Theatre on the campus of the University of Memphis, Taylor will deliver the Belle McWilliams Lecture in American History on the subject of “The Economy of Violence: The American Revolution in the South.”
Clay Stauffer
Chalice Press
128 pages
$18.99
“Clay Stauffer addresses the challenges that preachers face when a serving a politically diverse congregation in Preaching Politics. Money, materialism, and their effects on modern-day faith and spirituality are viewed through the teachings of Jesus…”
–From the publisher
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.
