Editor's Note
Spring is here and it’s bringing more literary gatherings along with the flowers and sunshine. The second annual Zone 3 Writers’ Festival and Book Fair will take place at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville on April 16-18. In Nashville, the MNPS Book Fest will be held at James Lawson High School on March 28, with authors including Sharon Cameron, Jeff Zentner, Tyler Merritt, and many more.
Today at the site, Hamilton Cain reviews The Devil Three Times, the debut novel by Rickey Fayne, who grew up in West Tennessee. Hamilton writes that the novel is “a multigenerational Black saga that limns the Atlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow South, and even the legend of blues maestro Robert Johnson. Fayne follows his own intuitive logic, blending biblical allusions with polyphonic first-person chapters as he maps out the Laurent family’s struggles and triumphs across generations.”
In her essay “Little Free Library,” Frances Figart chronicles her effort to create literary community in rural East Tennessee — and how that community developed in a way she didn’t expect. She writes that “perhaps our neighbors were more familiar with Winchesters than Wuthering Heights and knew more about oxycontin than O. Henry. But I was determined.”
Rounding out this week’s offerings is a look at the 40th anniversary edition of Nancy Lemann’s The Ritz of the Bayou, her unconventional, unforgettable account of the 1985 racketeering trial of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. The book is a meditation on reckless politicians and what Lemann calls “human frailty,” but it’s also an unsentimental, sometimes unsparing love letter to New Orleans and the South.
News Roundup
- Steve Stern’s A Fool’s Kabbalah was reviewed in The New York Review.
- A poem by Tiana Clark was featured in Poem-a-Day.
- Patricia Spears Jones received the Rauschenberg Centennial Award.
- Alice Randall was interviewed for This Is Nashville.
- Sheree Renée Thomas wrote about the film Sinners for MS NOW.
