Nonfiction | Chapter 16

One Giant Step Back

Margaret Lazarus Dean bids a nuanced farewell to American spaceflight

By Michael Ray Taylor | May 14, 2015

May 14, 2015 In 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean drove repeatedly from her home in Knoxville to Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch the final launches of the three surviving craft in the American space-shuttle fleet. In Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight, she recounts these trips and reflects eloquently on what it means to have lost the ability to launch humans into space from U.S. soil. Dean will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 18, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

A Typesetter’s Love Letter to Books

Taking a love of the printed word to a new level

By Lindsay Lynch | May 8, 2015

May 8, 2015 When one of my old friends finally asked me what exactly I was doing in Nashville, I said I was working in a letterpress shop that specialized in nineteenth-century printing techniques. I left out the fact that I wasn’t being paid. Even so, at the moment, it sounded a whole lot better than toiling away at law school.

Mirror Images

Two, Melissa Ann Pinney’s new collection of photographs, captures pairs of all kinds

By Susannah Felts | April 29, 2015

April 29, 2015 Two by Melissa Ann Pinney, a photography collection paired with personal essays edited and introduced by Ann Patchett, explores pairings of all sorts: couples, doublings, twins, and reflections. Pinney will discuss her work at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 6, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

Car Trouble

There are times when the only recourse to automotive despair is Neil Diamond

By Morey Hill | April 24, 2015

April 24, 2015 It started off with a low, quiet groan. The kind of noise my roommate, Chet, makes when I mention things like “utility bills” or “soap.” Although something clearly wasn’t right, I just didn’t want to spend the money to get it fixed. It was a subtle noise, and my approach was to drown it out—I turned up the radio.

“Time to Go Back and Tell the Whole Story”

In a new memoir, John Oates will focus on his life as a solo musician

By Mary Emily Vatt | April 22, 2015

April 22, 2015 Rock’n’Roll icon John Oates has signed a book deal with St. Martin’s Press and will release a memoir, still untitled, in 2016.

America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Narrative History, 1837-2009

April 21, 2015

“This narrative provides a comprehensive history of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The book concludes that race, the Civil Rights movements, and black and white philanthropy had much affect on the development of these minority institutions.”

–From the publisher

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down