April 2, 2014 Robin Layton’s new book of photography, hoop: the american dream, captures the romance of basketball through images of lone baskets around the country. Ranging from urban playgrounds to suburban parks to backboards nailed to the sides of Iowa barns, Layton’s subjects are as various as the people who play the game. Robin Layton will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 4 at 6:30 p.m.
March 20, 2014 Marjorie Garber believes that the way we read Shakespeare’s plays tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the Bard himself. In an interview with Chapter 16, Garber discusses her approach to Shakespeare, her love of literature, and her commitment to intellectual speculation. She will speak at Rhodes College in Memphis on March 27, 2014, at 7 p.m. Her talk, “Occupy Shakespeare: Shakespeare and/in the Humanities,” is free and open to the public.
March 18, 2014 In The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, Stephen Wade unearths the stories behind classic Library of Congress folk recordings. In thirteen involving narratives, he demonstrates how cultural forces and personal experiences combined in a few brief moments behind a microphone to create powerful musical legacies.
March 17, 2013“> According to rocker Graham Nash, the harmony that gave the world songs like “Carry On,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Teach Your Children”––songs that defined an era––emerged fully formed. In Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, Nash documents his time with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young, and describes the rise of his earlier band, The Hollies. In an event cosponsored by Parnassus Books and the Nashville Public Library, Nash will appear on March 21, 2014, at the downtown library for a brief talk and book signing. The talk is free, but book purchase is required to enter the signing line.
March 12, 2014 In A Late Encounter With the Civil War Vanderbilt English professor Michael Kreyling continues the examination of collective memory he began in 2010 with The South That Wasn’t There. By examining a variety of sources high and low, Kreyling argues persuasively that—channeling Faulkner’s famous aphorism—“The past is never dead—it’s not even past.” Michael Kreyling will introduce the James Franco film version of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Cinema on March 13, 2014, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
February 24, 2014 “In the decades since first encountering Walden in my late teens, I had often glimpsed Thoreau as the bearded sage of literature, natural history, or civil liberties,” writes Michael Sims. “I had seldom met the awkward young man who loved to sing, who ran a private school and applied his engineering skills to the pencil business, who popped popcorn and performed magic tricks for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, faced his own illnesses and the deaths of loved ones, and tried to make it as a freelance writer in New York City.” In The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Sims offers a portrait of a young man who went on to mold both American literature and American identity. Sims will appear at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville on April 11, 2014, with a book-signing at 6 p.m. and a free public address at 7 p.m.
