A cemetery caretaker, at home among the dead, drawn into the fraught world of the living.
A husband and father who knows well the tragic allure of guns, putting his down.
Ghosts in the kitchen, reminding us that food doesn’t just bring us together for meals but connects us across generations.
These stories and more will be part of Tennessee’s most “storied” weekend of the year: the 2024 Southern Festival of Books, which will be held October 26-27 in downtown Nashville at Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Tennessee State Library & Archives, with some 150 authors and 25,000 readers.
The 36th annual edition of the festival — free, as always — runs from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Sunday. It features author readings, panel sessions, and discussions of works ranging from literary and historical fiction to mystery and fantasy, memoirs, biographies and other nonfiction, poetry, children’s stories, and young adult literature. Featured books will be available for purchase and can be signed by authors.
If you’ve never been, think book club as block party, complete with food trucks and performance stages featuring music, spoken word and theater.
Along with the weekend festival, there are two events on Thursday, October 24: a ticketed fundraiser for Humanities Tennessee with Erik Larson, author of Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War; and Student Day, with writing exercises and author meet-and-greets, attended by 500 high school students from Metro Nashville Public Schools.
On Friday, October 25, the festival will partner with The Porch to offer writing workshops at the Tennessee State Museum. (These workshops require pre-registration and a fee. See the festival schedule for details.)
Here’s a book lover’s leap into just a few of the festival highlights:
Fiction that transports
Step into an Appalachian cemetery in the company of one of the South’s beloved storytellers: Ron Rash’s novel The Caretaker is a tale of family, love, war and grief. The caretaker of the title is the scarred but stalwart Blackburn Gant, “an indelible protagonist,” our reviewer wrote, “guiding us through this melancholy fable of haunted loves and losses.”
Jayne Anne Phillips’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Night Watch transports us to the wake of the Civil War, with a setting as chilling as any battlefield — the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. The Pulitzer judges called it a “beautifully rendered novel” about a mother and daughter trying to heal.
Fans of Ace Atkins’ thrillers, buckle up. You’re Memphis-bound in Don’t Let the Devil Ride, featuring private eye Porter Hayes, whose very name is a nod to Tennessee’s first city of soul. “I love the city for all the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Atkins told Chapter 16. “Its grit and rich history make this place unique.”
Renée Watson, a celebrated author of young adult books, has branched into adult fiction with skin & bones, a novel she’s said gave her the chance to explore the “messiness of love and the complications of relationships.”
Ruben Reyes Jr.’s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven is a short story collection that captures the immigrant experience with “stunning aesthetic variety,” our reviewer said, including metafiction and science fiction. One story imagines an altogether new destination for immigrants fleeing climate change. Its title? “The Salvadoran Slice of Mars.”
Meanwhile, back in Tennessee, one of the state’s literary classics — the late Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree — will be celebrated in the multimedia presentation Suttree’s Knoxville: A Hymn to the Past in Film and Music, developed by archivist Eric Dawson. The special presentation will include documentary footage from Suttree-era Knoxville, music, and short readings from the novel, which was among the 50 notable Tennessee books honored as part of Humanities Tennessee’s 50th birthday this year.
Revelatory poetry
Folk music icon Joan Baez has been writing poems privately for decades. Now she’s sharing them in the collection When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. She writes about her childhood, her family, her musical friends and more in deeply personal poems that are as intimate as diary entries.
Of note also are two poets from closer to home. East Tennessee’s Jane Hicks, in her collection The Safety of Small Things, demonstrates what our reviewer called “revelatory vision,” while writing about nature, shadows, a solar eclipse, and a woman in a coma. Nashville-based Ben Groner III’s debut collection, Dust Storms May Exist, is concerned with travel and captures “both the revelatory” — there’s that word again — “thrill and the surreal isolation of the roadtripping observer,” our reviewer said.
Nonfiction that startles and sings
Andre Dubus III’s Ghost Dogs is an essay collection covering some 25 years and subjects ranging from bounty hunting to learning to knit a scarf. But it all adheres because these are stories of the author’s life and oft-contradictory nature, honestly and artfully told. In the centerpiece essay “If I Owned a Gun,” Dubus writes about the powerful pull of guns, the damage he’s seen them do, and how he was able to walk away from them.
Memoir meets cookbook at the kitchen table. And don’t mind the ghosts — they’re here to guide us. That’s the recipe for Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson, a former Kentucky poet laureate who, in an interview with Chapter 16, said the book has been “a healing exercise in moving through grief and history and family through food.”
Grief is in the title of Sloane Crosley’s memoir about the suicide of a dear friend. A tough subject for a reader, perhaps, but Grief Is for People has been widely praised for the quality of the author’s writing, her honesty and humanity, and even, despite the subject matter, her wit.
On a musical note, there’s My Black Country, in which novelist and songwriter Alice Randall celebrates the Black voices in a genre that hasn’t always welcomed them. Subtitled A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future, the book has scope and power. “Her words,” our reviewer said of Randall, “remind the country music listener to pay attention.”
And, there’s Ann Powers’ Traveling, a book on legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell that’s not a conventional biography but rather an unconventional take on a singular artist. Our reviewer called it a “hybrid work that … reads like a long conversation with a friend who is telling you what she thinks.”
Young readers, gather around
Young readers — the bright future of the book world — will be well served at the festival. Katherine Applegate and Gennifer Choldenko’s Mouse and His Dog is the latest from their middle grade Dogtown series, in which a self-described “ordinary field mouse, the size and weight of an average tomato,” tries to find canine friend Buster a forever home.
Doan Phuong Nguyen’s A Two-Placed Heart is a middle grade tale about sisterhood and identity in which 12-year-old Bom finds a novel way to ensure the family history is not forgotten — writing her own memoir in poems.
Andrew Maraniss’ Beyond the Game is a nonfiction chapter book series about athletes who excel beyond their sporting arenas. The latest tells the story of WNBA star Maya Moore, who became a champion not just at basketball but also at social justice.
True tales. Fantastical journeys. Stories of grief, of love. Tears, laughter, and song.
The Southern Festival of Books, one of the country’s largest and oldest literary events, is back.