Happy Vagrancy
Happy Vagrancy: Essays from an Easy Chair
Sam Pickering
Univ Tennessee Press
173 pages
$18.95
“The essays in Sam Pickering’s new collection sing with thoughtful observations on life, death, love, and literature. Whether attending a reunion at Sewanee, cruising the Caribbean, wandering the streets of Storrs, Connecticut, or rambling through Nova Scotia, Pickering is able to work a quotation, insight, or reminiscence into almost every page. “
–From the publisher
October 9, 2015 Twenty-seven years ago, if you had asked me about the best time to visit Nashville, I would have said the second weekend in October—the weekend of the Southern Festival of Books. It’s a guaranteed good time. Rain or shine. At the festival, just showing up to hear the same author is considered invitation enough to engage your seatmate in conversation. Attending the Southern Festival of Books is the closest a visitor can come to being an instant insider in Nashville, where the New South begins. If you asked me that question today, I would say the same damn thing.
October 8, 2015 In The Upstairs Wife, Rafia Zakaria nestles the story of her aunt’s difficult marriage within a broadly-sketched account of Pakistan’s torturous past, humanizing the country’s suffering and making its complex political situation more understandable, if no less troubling. Zakaria will discuss the book on October 9, 2015, at 3:30 p.m. in Conference Room 1A-B of the Nashville Public Library. The event, part of the Southern Festival of Books, is free and open to the public.
October 7, 2015 “I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.” Rick Bragg will discuss My Southern Journey on October 10, 2015, at noon in Conference Room 1 of the Nashville Public Library. The event, part of the Southern Festival of Books, is free and open to the public.
October 2, 2015 Phyllis Tickle, influential author of more than two dozen books about faith and religion, died of lung cancer on September 22, 2015, at her home in Lucy, Tennessee. She was eighty-one.