WYPL Book Talk

Megan Abbott - The Fever

Megan Abbott is an Edgar-winning novelist who started her career writing classic noir stories like Bury Me Deep and The Song is You, but has moved her focus to more contemporary setting for her last three novels, The End of Everything, Dare Me, and the brand new one,The Fever, about a mysterious illness causing violent seizures among high school girls in a tight-knit community.

Kevin Brockmeier - A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip

Kevin Brockmeier has appeared on Book Talk three times prior to talk about his short story collection, The View from the Seventh Layer, as well as his novels A Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination. This time he will be discussing his new memoir, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip about his experiences in seventh grade while growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1980s.

Eric Jerome Dickey - A Wanted Woman

 

Memphis native Eric Jerome Dickey recently stopped by the Book Talk studios to talk about his newest international thriller, A Wanted Woman, which introduces a new series starring the beautiful but deadly assassin known as Reaper.

Michael Pollan - Cooked

photo by Ken Light

Michael Pollan is most likely the biggest voice in food writing in America, especially when it comes to economic and sociological aspects of the business of food production. In his book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, he examines four styles of food prep and how older, slower styles contrast against modern food processing.

Keith Thomson - 7 Grams of Lead

Keith Thomson blogs about national security matters for the Huffington Post. In addition to his journalistic duties, he's also a screenwriter and has written several novels. He's appeared on book talk to discuss Once a Spy and Twice a Spy about a retired CIA agent with Alzheimer's, but today we about his new one, Seven Grams of Lead, where a journalist learns too much and goes on the run to discover the truth and save his own life.

Scott Phillips - Hop Allley

 

Scott Phillips stopped by last year to talk about his novel Rake, in which an amoral American soap opera actor becomes a star on French television and attempts to make a movie while dealing the shadiest sides of the Parisian wealthy. His new western novel, Hop Alley, sees the return of Bill Ogden, who was introduced in the novel Cottonwood. Ogden is a good-natured sociopath who skates through life with little thought to consequences in the American Wild West.

Greg Iles - Natchez Burning

 
Greg Iles is a superstar thriller writer who has sold millions of books around the world. In 2011, he was grievously injured in a car crash. He's worked hard to recover and has just released his fourth novel to star Penn Cage, a former writer and prosecutor who is the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. The new book, Natchez Burning, the first of a trilogy, looks at how the crimes of a domestic, racist terror group in the 1960s have affected contemporary Mississippi and Louisiana.

Ace Atkins - Robert B Parker's Cheap Shot

 

 (photo copyright: Carrefour, Ltd., 2014)                                         

                                            

Ace Atkins is an Edgar-nominated writer known for his incredible historical true-crime novels, his current Quinn Colson series about an Army Ranger who returns home to become a sheriff in north Mississippi, and he has also written the last three books in the Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. The newest of which is entitled Cheap Shot and is available from Putnam.

 Ace will be at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on Thursday, May 15th at 6:00 p.m. to sign books. 

Holly George-Warren - A Man Called Destruction

 

                                                                                  (photo by Mark Loete)

The legend goes that the second time Memphis native Alex Chilton ever sang into a microphone was when he recorded "The Letter" for The Box Tops. A massive hit which spent four weeks at number one on the pop charts, "The Letter" would prove to be Chilton's biggest hit. While he reached his commercial peak when he was 16 years old, his artistic peak would come later.

Chilton passed away unexpectedly at age 59 in 2010, and his legacy was further bolstered by last year's documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, Holly George-Warren's biography A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man looks at the man in full, from the tragic drowning of his older brother, to his bohemian upbringing in Midtown Memphis, to stardom transitioning to critical darling, to his tumultuous early solo career and as a dishwasher in New Orleans, and finally to his becoming one of the most-respected interpreters of American music.

Holly George-Warren is a veteran music journalist having written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Oxford American, among many others. She has also edited and authored many books including Public Cowboy No.1 :The Life and Times of Gene Autry and Honky-Tonk Heroes and Hillbilly Angels: The Pioneers of Country & Western Music. She has won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and has been twice nominated for a Grammy for her liner notes.

Ashton Lee - The Reading Circle

Linda Lloyd talks to Ashton Lee about The Reading Circle, the second novel in his Cherry Cola Book Club series. Mary Beth Mayhew is trying to save the library from the funding chopping block, and the men in the club are wanting their tastes represented in the club's selections. Humorous and heart-warming, The Reading Cicle invites you into small-town life in contemporary Mississippi.

Dane Huckelbridge - Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit

Dane Huckelbridge's fiction and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Republic and Tin House. William Morrow has recently published his intoxicating non-fiction book debut, Bourbon: A History of the American Spirit.

Jessica Khoury - Vitro

Jessica Khoury's first novel Origin had a shadowy biotech company genetically engineering immortality and the teenager who was the result of the research. Her new novel, Vitro, published by Razorbill/Penguin, has a different cast of characters, but the same company is manipulating humanity itself for their own ends. 17-year-old Sophie Crue returns to the South Pacific to search for her estranged mother and discovers the truth about the research facility where her mother has been working.

Amy Greene - Long Man

 

Amy Greene's first novel Bloodroot was a critical and commercial success when it was published in 2010. 2014 brings her sophomore effort, Long Man, about the people who stayed behind in a small Appalachian town on the verge of being flooded by the TVA in an effort to bring electricity and stability to the people of east Tennessee.

Wylie Cash - This Dark Road to Mercy

 
Wylie Cash's first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, the story of a death of a small boy in a Holiness Pentecostal church in the hills of western North Carolina, won the Crime Writer's Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award as well as the SIBA Fiction Book of the Year Award. His new novel is This Dark Road to Mercy, and it is published by William Morrow.

Sheila Turnage - Three Times Lucky

 

Sheila Turnage's first novel for middle graders and up, Three Times Lucky, received a 2013 Newbery Honor and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Book. Kathy Dawson Books, an imprint of Penguin, has just released the second episode following the preteen Desperado Detective Agency, and it's entitled The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing.

Alan Lightman - The Accidental Universe

Alan Lightman, a native of Memphis, is the first professor at MIT to receive appointments in both science and the humanities. He's best known in literary circles for his novels Einstein's Dreams and The Diagnosis. Pantheon has recently published a collection of his essays entitled The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.

James Scott - The Kept

James Scott's debut novel, The Kept, has garnered praise from reviewers, having been named a Best Book of the Month by Amazon and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Set in upstate New York at the end of the 19th century, a woman and her 12 year-old son set out into the deep, winter snow for revenge, while harboring secrets from each other.

James Magnuson - Famous Writers I Have Known

 

James Magnuson heads up the Michener Center for Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He draws upon that experience for his new novel, Famous Writers I Have Known. Small-time grifter Frankie Abandonato gets in over his head in in New York and heads out to Austin, Texas, where he gets sucked into the world of literature and MFA programs. Could this be the longest and biggest con in Frankie's career?

Aram Goudsouzian - Down to the Crossroads

 

Aram Goudsouzian's previous two books looked at the lives of actor/director Sidney Poitier and basketball legend Bill Russell, who were major cultural icons during the 1960s in their fields, as well as in the push for Civil Rights. In his new book, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Meredith March Against Fear, Goudsouzian (chair of the history department at the University of Memphis) looks at a compressed time period of the June 1966 march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, as well as the multitude of personalities and organizations on both sides of the racial divide.

Goudsouzian will give a lecture at Rhodes College on Thursday, February 13 at 6:00 p.m. (reception at 5:30 p.m.), and a reading and signing at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on Monday, February 24 at 6:00 p.m.

Laurie Halse Anderson - The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson is a bestselling and prize-winning author of children's books and young adult novels, including Speak, Fever 1793, and Wintergirls. She and Stephen Usery talk about her new novel  The Impossible Knife of Memory, which is published by Viking.