Marja Mills remembers her time as Harper Lee’s next-door neighbor
June 3, 2015 When Marja Mills lived next door to Harper Lee, she frequently dined with the legendary author of To Kill A Mockingbird, her sister Alice, and their close circle of friends. Mills will discuss her memoir about the experience, The Mockingbird Next Door, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 10, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
Novelist Steve Stern found his fictional world by searching for a lost Jewish tradition
June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.
Steve Inskeep casts new light on the ideas of land ownership that led to the Trail of Tears
May 27, 2015 In Jacksonland: Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab, Steve Inskeep has produced a compelling study of the interwoven lives of Jackson and Ross, as well as the struggle over land that played out between whites and Native Americans. Inskeep will appear at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville on June 2, 2015, and at the Nashville Public Library on June 4, 2015.
In Fresh Water from Old Wells, Cindy Henry McMahon confronts her family’s tumultuous path toward social justice
May 21, 2015 In Fresh Water From Old Wells, Cindy Henry McMahon reveals a tumultuous family history that encompasses both civil-rights activism and backwoods hippie enclaves as she seeks to restore her own fractured memories. McMahon will discuss Fresh Water from Old Wells at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 31, 2015, at 2 p.m.
In Hold Still, photographer Sally Mann interrogates the past that shaped her
May 18, 2015 Photographer Sally Mann’s body of work—which includes haunting images of her family and the Southern landscape, as well as unsettling studies of death and decay—is remarkable for its beauty and singular intensity. Hold Still, her new memoir, is a fascinating meditation on the sources of that work, as well as a reckoning with the unreliability of both memory and photography as ways of preserving the past. Mann will discuss the book in a conversation with novelist Ann Patchett at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville on May 21, 2015, at 6:15 p.m.
Biographer Andrew Maraniss gets a surprise phone call from Ethel Kennedy
May 18, 2015 The judges of the Robert F. Kennedy Book and Journalism Awards have singled out Andrew Maraniss’s Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South for special recognition.
