Tender and Tragic
Coming to terms with guns or learning to knit a scarf, Andre Dubus III’s contradictions make for compelling reading in Ghost Dogs.
Nonfiction
Forging an Autonomous Path
Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell weaves research, reportage, and analysis to tell the iconic singer-songwriter’s story in a conversational way. Powers will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 12.
Loving Country
The music scene in Nashville is tricky and hard to describe until you figure out how obsessed the city is with the relationship between conformity and rebellion. Brian Fairbanks provides plenty of detail about the full-cylinder lives of country music iconoclasts Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings in Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever.
Perils and Prospects
From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, a new anthology edited by historians Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr., gives academics and lay people alike fresh ways to consider the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter.
A Southern Story
In The Realms of Oblivion, Andrew Ross tells the history of the 19th-century South through the experience of the Davies family and the Black people who worked their land in both slavery and freedom.
“Haunting My Own Name”
Comprised of braided essays which use key pop-culture moments to weave together stories of triumph and personal exploration, Julian Randall’s The Dead Don’t Need Reminding unearths grief and deeply rooted family histories.
