This weekend's 26th Southern Festival of Books at War Memorial Plaza and the downtown Nashville Public Library offers a bonanza of literary lions, first-time authors, beloved storytellers and distinguished journalists, all for free. But the crowded schedule is going to make it impossible for you to see them all. With that many worthwhile guests, you'll have difficult choices right up to the very end Sunday afternoon.
Let us help. Below, we offer a day-by-day, hour-by-hour guide to the festival's offerings. After that, you'll find reviews and interviews — supplied by the heavy-lifting literary site Chapter16.org, which, like the festival, is sponsored by Humanities Tennessee — that provide more depth on this year's many remarkable guests.
Even with this much room, we still couldn't include every worthwhile panel or event. Go to humanitiestennessee.org and peruse the author list and the schedules for additional information — and use the guide below to help you get started.
FRIDAY
The toss-ups begin with the very first slot, at noon. Christina Baker Kline has dominated the trade-paperback bestseller list with her blockbuster novel Orphan Train, but she's up against a pairing with special appeal to locals: Andrew Maraniss — whose well-reviewed Strong Inside recounts Vanderbilt basketball player Percy Wallace's historic assault on the color line — and Chapter16.org contributor Clay Risen, now a staff editor of The New York Times op-ed page and author of the Civil Rights Act examination The Bill of the Century. They're in Room 16 of Legislative Plaza.
In nearby Room 30, network-TV baking finalist Francine Bryson touts her Blue Ribbon Baking From a Redneck Kitchen with veteran TV personality and cookbook author Tammy Algood (The Southern Slow Cooker Bible). What's cooking for two 16-year-old Eagle Scouts, alas, is trouble as they stumble upon a terrorist plot in Blake Fontenay's Deliverance-meets-Red Dawn thriller Scouts' Honor (noon, Nashville Public Library, Conference Room II).
A topic that's both a Music City blessing and curse — the co-write — gets a literary spin at a panel of poets convened by Tennessee Poet Laureate Maggi Britton Vaughn (noon, Nashville Public Library, Third Floor Program Room). Anne McCue is billed solo, however, in the fest's opening Music Stage slot; here's hoping she brings her sousaphone — or at least something metal to deflect the tonsorial onslaught of Nashville Rep performing selections from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (12:15 p.m., Artober Performing Arts Stage).
In the Scene's Best of Nashville cover story this week, we make a case that Vanderbilt writer-in-residence Tony Earley is the local author of the year. Earley will support that claim quite eloquently with a 1 p.m. reading at Nashville Public Library Auditorium from Mr. Tall, his first new collection of stories in 20 years, already the subject of raves from Vanity Fair and The New York Times Book Review.
At the same time, in the library's Conference Room II, there's a reading by a new literary-fiction hopeful: poet turned novelist Gregory Sherl, whose George Saunders-esque metafictional romance The Future for Curious People had no less a figure than Roxane Gay invoking Borges and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in comparison. He's joined by award-winning Waffle House Rules novelist Joe Formichella, editor of the Southern short stories collection The Shoe Burnin'.
We're not sure there'll be much audience overlap between Cassandra King (1 p.m., Room 12, Legislative Plaza) reading from The Same Sweet Girl's Guide to Life — billed irresistibly as "advice from a failed Southern belle" — and the dynamite panel on dueling and wrestling featuring cartoonist Box Brown and acclaimed The Book of Duels author Michael Garriga (1 p.m., Room 30, Legislative Plaza). But those trying to make both can pause in between to hear some of performance poet Diallo on the Artober Performing Arts Stage.
Or stop in Room 16 to hear legendary Boston Globe journalist Curtis Wilkie (Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians and Other Persons of Interest) recount four decades of covering some of the South's most notorious cutthroats, hatemongers, scoundrels and scalawags. That'll make it a tough call for those wanting to hear thriller authors Daniel Friedman and Bradley Harris expound on "Surly Sleuths on the Back Side of 60" (1 p.m., Room 29, Legislative Plaza), a panel for geriatric gumshoes less concerned with MO's than AARP.
A theme running throughout this year's Southern Festival is veterans' experiences, and the "Destruction and Creation" panel (2 p.m., Nashville Public Library Auditorium) gathers two well-regarded authors of war fiction: Kevin Powers, whose Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds was among the most lauded literary debuts of recent years; and Laird Hunt, who's received excellent notices for his novel Neverhome, the story of a homesteader who takes up arms and joins the Union Army — leaving her husband behind.
A less battle-focused slant on the War Between the States emerges from master Civil War historian James McPherson's Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander-in-Chief (2 p.m., Room 16, Legislative Plaza), while bestselling Nashville historical-romance novelist Tamera Alexander plunges into the war's aftermath in A Beauty So Rare: A Belmont Mansion Novel (2 p.m., Room 29, Legislative Plaza). Here's hoping for some steamy clinches in Adelicia Acklen's Master Bedroom Suite on the hand-sewn Grosvenor Wilton carpets.
In one of the festival's most hotly contended slots, all these are up against Frances Mayes and Lauren Oliver as well as a longtime South Carolina congressman and high-ranking House Democrat James Clyburn (2 p.m., Nashville Public Library Special Collections Room) discussing his memoir Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Profoundly Black. Making the choice even more difficult: a "Faith in the Future" panel 2 p.m. in the library's Conference Room III pairing the authors of two striking first novels: British playwright Peggy Riley, whose Amity & Sorrow follows a woman's flight from a religious cult with her two young daughters; and noted short-story author Angela Pneuman, whose Lay It on My Heart examines a blue Kentucky girl's trials and tribulations after her prophet father is institutionalized.
Spiritual quests continue 3 p.m. in Nashville Public Library's Conference Room II with nonfiction works by two authors with local ties: Linda Leaming, who mines her years in South Asia for insights in her new book A Field Guide to Happiness: Twenty-Two Things I Learned in Bhutan; and Tennessean religion columnist Ray Waddle, who seeks "reclaiming faith despite the cultural noise" in his intriguingly titled Undistorted God. If poetry is your surest link to the divine, you have several chances to worship in this slot, from the readings by Bill Brown and Jane Hicks (Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Room) to the "rhythmatic performance poetry" of Relativ (Artober Performing Arts Stage) to the "Atrocities and Glories of Our World" panel featuring John Bensko and Megan Sexton (Nashville Public Library, Conference Room III).
Seguing from the sacred to the profane, the war theme resumes in a panel on political, legal and tactical roles in modern warfare 3 p.m. in Legislative Plaza's Room 16. Leading the remarkable lineup is award-winning Hanoi's War historian Lien-Hang Nguyen, editor of the upcoming three-volume The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War; joining her are Ganesh Sitaraman, the Vanderbilt Law School professor who served as policy director and senior counsel to Congresswoman Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Newton, Vanderbilt Law professor and co-author of Enemy of the State: The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein.
Curious how to get a literary scene started — or at the very least a supportive community for readers and writers? Try the "Writing Well with Others" panel (3 p.m., Room 29, Legislative Plaza) featuring Susannah Felts, Leslie LaChance, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Leigh Anne Hornfeldt and Katie McDougall. If you already write well with others, join the death and detection artists assembled for the "Creating Characters Mystery Readers Love" panel (3 p.m., Room 31, Legislative Plaza) — including Nashville mystery author Jaden Terrell, who boasts a red belt in Tae Kwon Do and a certification in equine massage therapy.
No word on how skilled Carolyn Curry is at horse rubdowns, but word of mouth is good on Suffer and Grow Strong (3 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Third Floor Program Room), her biography of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, the Wesleyan graduate impoverished by the Civil War whose voluminous diaries give unique insight into the changing roles of women throughout the 19th century. You can see a half-hour of her talk, then catch the 3:30 appearance in Room 30 of Legislative Plaza by debut novelists Natalie Baszile (Queen Sugar) and Nadia Hashimi. The latter's The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, an account of two young Afghan women in different times who find escape by dressing as boys, received glowing praise from The Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini.
If one book could serve as the festival's rallying point, it might be The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry — a book lover's Valentine about an indie bookseller whose life is transformed by an unexpected arrival, and who in turn sets about transforming the lives of his customers and colleagues through the myriad pleasures of reading. Its author, Gabrielle Zevin, hosts what is sure to be one of the weekend's most warmly received readings at 3 p.m. in the Nashville Public Library Auditorium — handy for snagging a book or two on the way out.
SATURDAY
You'll need fortification for the day ahead, which features perhaps the toughest choices of the entire schedule. Avail yourself of strong coffee and bracing company at the festival's popular annual Women's National Book Association Coffee with Authors (9 a.m., Nashville Public Library Auditorium), with Gabrielle Zevin and Nadia Hashimi returning from the previous day. Joining them are the authors of two novels arriving at the festival on a groundswell of buzz, both concerning love triangles set against a historical backdrop: Lily King's Euphoria takes off from an incident from the early life of anthropologist Margaret Mead, while Ann Weisgarber's The Promise places a new wife and her husband's pining housekeeper in the path of the unimaginably devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane.
To understand a maelstrom of man's making — the War on Terror — see Wall Street Journal correspondent Anand Gopal (10 a.m., Room 16, Legislative Plaza) discuss how the U.S. military unwittingly revived the Taliban as a force in Afghanistan. His book No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes is regarded as one of the essential texts to date on military missteps in the region.
Alas, his slot is directly opposite one of the festival's favorites, novelist Ron Rash (10 a.m., Room 12, Legislative Plaza), as well as poet Richard Blanco, the Wild Things! panel on the continued uses of enchantment in children's literature (10 a.m., Room 29, Legislative Plaza), Huey "Piano" Smith biographer John Wirt leading a panel of veteran music historians (10 a.m., Room 30, Legislative Plaza), and respected Yummy/Chess Rumble YA author G. Neri reading from his verse biography Hello, I'm Johnny Cash (10 a.m., Nashville Public Library, Third Floor Program Room).
From here, the choices only get harder. No doubt many folks will be torn between two of the weekend's most anticipated speakers, memoirist and New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow and Marja Mills (11 a.m., Nashville Public Library, Conference Room 1AB), whose bestseller The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee answers some of the questions you've always wanted to ask about the reclusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Switching gears from her adult ghost story to her smash YA Delirium trilogy, Lauren Oliver joins Vanderbilt student turned rising-star author Kat Zhang for a talk on "Dystopian Novels Fighting the Status Quo" (11 a.m., Room 31, Legislative Plaza).
Pause, if you can, in your dash across the plaza to hear some of Julie Christensen's 11 a.m. set at the Music Stage. She's a relatively new Nashvillian whose credits include the '80s post-punk act Chris D. and Divine Horsemen and backing-vocal stints with everyone from Leonard Cohen and Todd Rundgren to Iggy Pop. But we can understand your hurry to get a seat for hilarious SFB favorite George Singleton (11 a.m., Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Room) — or if you have the kids in tow, for Pete the Cat creator and Atlanta children's author-entertainer Eric Litwin, who's expected to draw a crowd to War Memorial Auditorium (11 a.m.).
Fans of local history will likely peel away for the "Biographies of Pivotal Tennesseans" panel (11 a.m., Nashville Public Library, Third Floor Program Room), featuring subjects ranging from John Sevier and Andrew Jackson to inaugural TVA chairman Arthur Morgan. If it's a scope beyond the state line you're seeking, however, try the "Immigrant Song" panel on novels of new Americans (11:30 a.m., Room 30, Legislative Plaza). Cristina Henríquez drew strong notices this summer for her novel The Book of Unknown Americans, an Amazon Best Book of the Month for June, but we're also excited to hear award-winning Love and Ghost Letters author Chantal Acevedo and Elsie Augustave, almost certainly the only author appearing this weekend who's been a Fulbright scholar and a choreographer for the National Dance Theater of Zaire.
Then wolf down some hot chicken or hit whichever food truck has the shortest line, because you're going to have few chances to eat lunch from here on out. A few weeks ago, we wrote why a nearly 20-year-old James Ellroy appearance at the old Tower Books remains the liveliest author reading we've ever seen. We expect no less from the Demon Dog noon at Nashville Public Library's Conference Room 1AB — though Station Eleven, the sweeping post-apocalyptic novel by British author Emily St. John Mandel, is shaping up as one of fall's biggest word-of-mouth recommendations, and will likely draw a crowd as well.
No less anticipated is Love and Ordinary Creatures, the first novel in almost a decade from bestselling The Woodsman's Daughter author Gwyn Hyman Rubio (noon, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Room). Advance word is rapturous on Rubio's most unusual love story — of which all we'll say is that one of the lovers may not be human. A similarly offbeat though all-American love story — that of an obsessive gearhead for his '57 Chevy — fuels Earl Swift's careening nonfiction romp Auto Biography (noon, Room 16, Legislative Plaza). Meanwhile, even those who know Grammy-winning Nashville producer, publicist and manager Tamara Saviano are said to be startled by the revelations in her frank memoir The Most Beautiful Girl (noon, Nashville Public Library, Conference Room II).
Any writer who tackles The Killer at this point has Nick Tosches' hellhound on his trail, but Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg seems well suited to the task of recording Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (12:30 p.m., War Memorial Auditorium). Even so, he better not try torching the podium with a Zippo and sneering "Follow that" to Abraham Smith (12:30 p.m., Artober Performing Arts Stage), as the Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer poet is said to be a daredevil performer — one reason he's contending in one of the fest's coolest side events, Third Man Records' Literary Death Match, at 8 p.m. Saturday.
Oh, for a half-dozen extra ears to hear them at the same time as Ishmael Beah, Nickolas Butler, gifted Appalachian poet-novelist Rita Quillen (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Conference Room III), and Richard Schweid, an author of boundless curiosity who can make any subject gripping — especially when it has multiple arms, as in his new Octopus (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Conference Room II). Of special note, though, are two authors looming as cult heroes in the making: Phil Klay, whose heralded short-story collection Redeployment takes an unflinching look at the effects of contemporary warfare (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library Auditorium); and Brock Clarke, whose exuberantly comic spy saga The Happiest People in the World arrives bearing mash notes from Richard Russo and The Family Fang author Kevin Wilson (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Room).
Some up-and-comer named Pat Conroy — the husband of Cassandra King, the bio says — is making his first appearance at the SFB, as editor-at-large for the University of South Carolina Press' new Story River Books imprint. (You can have a Southern Festival of Books for a quarter-century without Pat Conroy?) We predict a bright future for this young man, and for Story River authors Mark Sibley-Jones, John Warley and Bernie Schein (2 p.m., War Memorial Auditorium). They're opposite — arrggh, you're killin' us, Southern Festival! — Gary Shteyngart, Lawrence Wright, The Big Smoke novelist and Literary Death Match competitor Adrian Matejka (2 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Room), and the star-studded panel of novelists Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Rebecca Makkai (The Hundred-Year House) and Maggie Shipstead (Astonish Me) 2 p.m. at Legislative Plaza's Room 12.
The 3 p.m. slot is going to find a lot of people trying to wedge into Nashville Public Library's Special Collections Room to hear the historic mash-up of Kendra DeColo and Patricia Lockwood. If you can't get in, see if the green light's blinking in Conference Room 1AB, where Fresh Air book reviewer Maureen Corrigan beats back ceaselessly against the current to convince us The Great Gatsby is a great book. Eh, we'll hear her out.
Over in Room 31 of Legislative Plaza, a high-powered panel of local mystery writers weighs in on the fine art of murder, including Steven Womack, J.T. Ellison and Sallie Bissell (3 p.m.). In Room 12, the phenomenally gifted East Tennessee novelist Amy Greene conducts a "Masters of Southern Fiction" panel with Big Fish author Daniel Wallace; let's hope she reads from her widely praised new novel Long Man, set in a town under the doomwatch of a coming TVA dam (3 p.m.).
The panel on the impact of inequality featuring sociologist Alice Goffman should be one of the festival's most compelling; make sure no one sees you skipping out to catch Oscar-winning songwriter Paul Williams — yes, Phantom of the Paradise's Swan! — and screenwriter Tracey Jackson sharing affirmations 3:30 p.m. at War Memorial. Close the day at 4:30 p.m. in Room 31 of Legislative Plaza, where Scott B. Bomar and Carla Jean Whitley trace the respective histories of Southern rock and the Muscle Shoals sound.
SUNDAY
Even if a photo book called Delta Dogs — providing just that — normally wouldn't tempt a second sniff from you, check this one out: It was shot by Maude Schuyler Clay, the famed photographer who worked early on as an assistant to William Eggleston, and her often stark, haunting photographs are not the stuff of Christmas calendars.
She appears at noon in Nashville Public Library's Conference Room II — prompting another tough choice among Jasper Fforde at War Memorial, Michael Sims at Nashville Public Library Auditorium, and best-selling Someone Else's Love Story romance novelist Joshilyn Jackson (noon, Room 12, Legislative Plaza). A wild card that sounds fascinating is the talk by musicologist Annegret Fauser (noon, Room 31, Legislative Plaza) on Sounds of War, her study of music during World War II, which makes the case that classical more than jazz or big-band was the form that defeated the Axis.
Rock fans won't want to be anywhere else at 1 p.m. than the talk by Barbara Barnes Sims (Room 31, Legislative Plaza), who worked PR at Sun Records from 1957 to 1960 alongside Sam Phillips and a pre-"Cowboy" Jack Clement. She's opposite returning SFB favorite Sharyn McCrumb (1 p.m., Room 12, Legislative Plaza), three-time Newbery Honors recipient Jacqueline Woodson (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Conference Room 1AB), and a panel on Southern food featuring Bites contributor Chris Chamberlain (The Southern Foodie's Guide to the Pig) and food truck connoisseur Julie Festa (1 p.m., Nashville Public Library Auditorium).
Weather permitting, this is a great afternoon to stake out the outdoor stages, including Tom House (1 p.m.), Tommy Womack (2 p.m.) and Adie Grey MacKenzie (3 p.m.) on the Music Stage and selections from Nashville Shakespeare Festival's recent Depression-era reworking of As You Like It (1 p.m.) on the Artober Performing Arts Stage. If you see kids racing across the plaza, likely they're headed for War Memorial Auditorium. That's where D.J. MacHale reads at 1 p.m. from Strike, the conclusion of his blockbuster SYLO Chronicles trilogy pitting 14-year-old Tucker Pierce against a massive sinister network.
If anyone can draw people away from the presentation by "The Streak"/"Ahab the Arab" hitmaker Ray Stevens (2:30 p.m., Nashville Public Library Auditorium), it's a writer whose calling card is a money quote from Publishers Weekly dubbing him "hilariously tasteless." That's Mississippi novelist John Pritchard, of Junior Ray fame; he anchors the "Hard Luck, Dark Humor and Weird Times" panel with fellow novelists Raymond Atkins and Stephen Roth (3 p.m., Room 30, Legislative Plaza). The timeslot also pits a fictionalized historical mystery — The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress, Ariel Lawhon's retelling of the Judge Joseph Crater vanishing (3 p.m., Nashville Public Library, Third Floor Program Room) — against a nonfiction historical crime saga, Alexis Coe's Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis.
In The Invitation, Clifton Taulbert (3 p.m., Room 16, Legislative Plaza) revisits the themes of his landmark memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, using the occasion of a visit to a former plantation home to examine the malingering legacy of slavery. As he's up against popular literary fantasy novelist Lev Grossman, consider this the last of the weekend's hard choices — except for which of this weekend's literary finds you want to read first.
