WYPL Book Talk

Loren Long - An Otis Christmas

Loren Long is best known for his series of picture books starring Otis the Tractor. In An Otis Christmas, Otis must brave the night and deep snow to help save a life on Christmas eve. We also talk about Long's illustration work for President Obama, as well as Long's appreciation of artists like Thomas Hart Benton and N.C. Wyeth.

Thomas Maltman - Little Wolves

Thomas Maltman's first novel, the Civil War-era set The Night Birds won an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. His new novel, Little Wolves is set in a small Minnesota town at the end of summer in 1987. A high school boy walks into town and kills a sheriff and then himself. His father and his English teacher both search for understanding in a town that has hidden many ills over the years.

Mark Greaney - Dead Eye

Memphian Mark Greaney has just published the fourth installment on his Gray Man series. In Dead Eye, former CIA assassin Court Gentry finds himself in Eastern Europe being hunted by his fellow Americans. When he receives assistance from an unexpected source, Gentry must decide if it is worth the risk to take someone at their word. Greaney will be signing his novels at The Booksellers at Laurelwood (387 Perkins Road, Memphis) on Thursday, December 5 at 6:00 p.m.

Cary Holladay - The Deer in the Mirror

 

Stephen Usery welcomes Cary Holladay back to the program to talk about her new, award-winning collection of short stories, The Deer in The Mirror. Set in many different eras ranging from the early 18th century to modern times, the stories are connected by characters who come from the same area of Virginia, and themes often revolve around the power dynamic of male-female relationships and our stewardship of nature.

Robert Gordon - Respect Yourself

Stephen Usery interviews Robert Gordon, a native Memphian and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Mid-South's musical history. He's a documentary film maker, as well as an author of books such as It Came from Memphis and Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. His new book is Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion.

Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly - The Tilted World

 

 

 

Stephen Usery interviews Edgar Award winner Tom Franklin and Pushcart Prize winner Beth Ann Fennelly.Beth Ann is a prize winning poet and essayist, and Tom's literary novels full of crime and violence have brought him much acclaim, including the CWA Golden Dagger for Crooked Letter Crooked Letter. They decided to team up for the new novel, The Tilted World, a story of orphans, moonshiners and revenuers set against the backdrop of America's greatest natural disaster, the Mississippi River flood of 1927.

Kami Garcia - Unbreakable

 

Stephen Usery welcomes Kami Garcia back to the program. Kami is one half of the duo responsible for the NY Times best-selling YA supernatural series, Beautiful Creatures a.k.a. The Caster Chronicles. Just in time for Halloween, she makes her solo debut with Unbreakable, the first in The Legion series about a teenage girl named Kennedy who is forced into a secret world of those who fight malevolent spirits on Earth.

Julie Cantrell - When Mountains Move

 

Stephen Usery interviews Julie Cantrell about her second novel, When Mountains Move, the follow-up to her best-selling and award-winning debut, Into the Free. Set in 1943, 17-year-old Millie Reynolds marries Bump Anderson,  and they move from Mississippi to Colorado to start a cattle ranch and leave her secret traumas behind.

Michael Farris Smith - Rivers

Stephen Usery interviews Michael Farris Smith about his new novel, Rivers. It's the story of a man named Cohen trying to survive the Mississippi Gulf coast in the near future where climate change has brought an endless succession of hurricanes to the area. The Federal government has declared the area a no-man's land where services or assistance will be not provided.

Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

Stephen Usery welcomes National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward back to the program. They will be discussing her new memoir, Men We Reaped, the story not only of her life but also the deaths of five young African-American men close to her family in rural southern Mississippi, including her only brother.

Jolina Petersheim - The Outcast

 
Stephen Usery interviews Jolina Petersheim about her debut novel, The Outcast: A Modern Retelling of The Scarlett Letter. Set in contemporary Tennessee, The Outcast in question is Rachel Stoltzfus a young woman with a baby recently born out wedlock who has been made unwelcome in her Old Order Mennonite community and must find her way among the outside world they call The English.

John Dufresne - No Regrets, Coyote

John Dufresne is a Guggenheim fellow, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. His first two novels, Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little were named New York Times notable books of the year. He's now trying his hand at crime fiction with No Regrets, Coyote, the story of middle-aged therapist Wylie Melville who gets caught up in in a tough situation when he's called into consult on a murder case on Christmas Eve down in south Florida.

Kiese Laymon - Long Division

 

Stephen Usery interviews Jackson, Mississippi native and Vassar College professor Kiese Laymon about his two new books. Long Division is the story of contemporary Jackson teenager named City Coldson, who finds a novel starring a teen from the 1980s with his same name. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of unflinching essays which examine race and class in America and how it often fails to live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all.

Eric Barnes - Something Pretty, Something Beautiful

 

Stephen Usery interviews Eric Barnes. Eric is the publisher of three newspapers: The Daily News, The Memphis News, and The Nashville Ledger. He's written short stories which have appeared in many fine journals such as Prairie Schooner and The Literary Review. 2009 saw his first novel publication with Shimmer, and Outpost19 has recently published Something Pretty, Something Beautiful.

Elaine Hussey - The Sweetest Hallelujah

 

Elaine Hussey is a new name on the southern literary fiction scene, although the woman behind that name, Peggy Webb, has published dozens of  romance, suspense, and mystery novels. Her new novel inspired her to take on a new pen name. The Sweetest Hallelujah is set in Tupelo, Mississippi in the 1950s, which becomes the meeting ground for women from different races and backgrounds to plan for the care of a young girl.

Matthew Guinn - The Resurrectionist

Stephen Usery interviews Matthew Guinn about his debut novel, The Resurrectionist, about a slave in the 1850s ordered to steal other slaves' corpses for dissection for a South Carolina medical school, as well as a 1990s doctor who learns of the story which jeopardizes his school's reputation.

Susan Crandall - Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall has published ten novels, including Magnolia Sky. and Seeing Red. Gallery Books has published her historical novel, Whistling Past the Graveyard, a story about a young, runaway white girl named Starla who becomes attached to a black woman named Eula, and their uneasy journey through Jim Crow landscape of Mississippi in the early 1960s.

Michael Harvey - The Innocence game

Michael Harvey is the co-creator and producer of the hit A&E television show Cold Case Files. He has earned a law degree, teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He also writes crime novels. He's published four starring the former Chicago cop and current PI Michael Kelly, and Knopf has recent published a standalone thriller which marries his love of journalism and criminal law in The Innocence Game.

David Berg - Run Brother, Run

David Berg is one of the most feared and respected trial attorneys in America. His brother Alan Berg was murdered in the spring of 1968. Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, was tried for the murder. David has recently published  Run, Brother, Run: A Memoir of Murder in My Family which looks at David's tumultuous family history leading up to the time of Alan's death, and the effect it and the subsequent trial had on him and his family.

Scott Phillips - Rake

Scott Phillips is probably best known for his debut novel, The Ice Harvest, which was made into a film with John Cusak and Billy Bob Thornton.Counterpoint has just released his novel Rake, the story of an American soap opera actor who gets in over his head when he tries to make a movie in Paris.