Category: Blurb

CBU and the Booksellers at Laurelwood present a Memphis Reads event featuring author Erik Larson and his latest book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, on Friday, April 15th, at CBU in the University Theater at 7:00 p.m.



Dead Wake is the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania. On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its 10th month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic Greyhounds, the fastest liner then in service and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack.



Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history.



It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history.



Larson is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. Dead Wake hit Number 1 on the Times list soon after launch.



Tickets can be purchased at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, or online at this link. All college students are admitted free with a student ID.

Erik Larson
CBU — University Theater
Friday, April 15
7:00 p.m.

Journalist Pate McMichael, author of KLANDESTINE: How a Klan Lawyer and a Checkbook Journalist Helped James Earl Ray Cover Up His Crime (Chicago Review Press) will discuss his book as part of the National Civil Rights Museum’s Book & Author Series. This event is free and open to the public.

On April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single bullet fired from an elevated and concealed position. Almost half a century later, unanswered questions surround the circumstances of his demise, and many still wonder whether justice was served.



After all, only one man, an escaped convict from Missouri named James Earl Ray, was punished for the crime. On the surface, Ray did not fit the caricature of a hangdog racist thirsty for blood. Media coverage has often portrayed him as hapless and apolitical, someone who must have been paid by clandestine forces. It’s a narrative that Ray himself put in motion upon his June 1968 arrest in London, then continued from jail until his death in 1998. In 1999, Dr. King’s own family declared Ray an innocent man.


After his arrest, Ray forged a publishing partnership with two very strange bedfellows: a slick Klan lawyer named Arthur J. Hanes, the de facto “Klonsel” for the United Klans of America; and checkbook journalist William Bradford Huie, the darling of Look magazine and a longtime menace of the KKK. Despite polar opposite views on race, Hanes and Huie found common cause in the world of conspiracy. Together, they thought they could make Memphis the new Dallas.



Relying on novel primary source discoveries gathered over an eight-year period, including a trove of newly released documents and dusty files, KLANDESTINE takes readers deep inside Ray’s Memphis jail cell and Alabama’s violent Klaverns. Told through Hanes and Huie’s key perspectives, it shows how a legacy of unpunished racial killings provided the perfect exigency to sell a lucrative conspiracy to a suspicious and outraged nation. 


McMichael is an award-winning journalist. His stories have been published in Atlanta magazine, Saint Louis magazine, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere.  

Pate McMichael
Thursday, March 31st
6 – 8 p.m.
National Civil Rights Museum (Hooks Hyde Hall)
450 Mulberry Street

Due to a death in the family, Bill Haltom has had to cancel the book signing scheduled for Saturday, March 26h, at Burke’s Book Store.

A later date will be named in the near future and we will keep you up to date.

Milk & Sugar: The Complete Story of Seersucker (Nautilus Publishing)  traces the origin of the seersucker suit from its humble beginnings to its rise as a darling of both men’s and women’s haute couture. It examines its role in Southern culture from courtrooms and law offices, churches and synagogues, fraternity row and sorority rush, tasteful garden gatherings to raucous fundraisers. Along the way, Haltom also outlines the regional “rules” of wearing and accessorizing seersucker and its embrace by fashionistas and celebrities from New York City to Hollywood.

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and 1,800 pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the king of twentieth-century smut, with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion, he wrote more than 400 novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.

Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father’s manuscripts and memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he’d loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.

In My Father, the Pornographer, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. This is a book about the life of a working writer who supports his family solely by the output of his typewriter; it’s about the awful psychic burdens one generation unthinkingly passes along to the next; and it’s about growing up in the Appalachian hills with a pack of fearless boys riding bicycles through the woods, happy and free.

“A literary detective story interwoven with memories of a youth riddled with sexual confusion and inarticulate yearning. . . . There is a touching universality to his tale and its mix of longing and despair . . . . In the end, the value of this haunting account lies in Offutt’s refusal to find a pat moral in his journey.” — The Washington Post

Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds. His books include Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.

Chris Offutt

Thursday, March 24^th

6 p.m.

story booth @ Crosstown Arts

438 N. Cleveland

Dog trainer and Memphian Bryan Bailey’s new book, Embracing the Wild in Your Dog, is about developing a deep understanding of the authors of your dog’s behavior-nature and the wolf. By doing so, you will learn the whys and hows of its behavior and how activating and deactivating the natural, wolf-like impulses and mechanisms in your dog will lead to the harmonious existence and the control you always dreamed of. Most of all, you will come to embrace the wild in your dog and the grace and the peace that is breathed into its acceptance.

​”[T]his book represents much more than a simple training guide. There is an undeniable power and beauty to the author’s musings as he weaves into the text vital lessons learned from his mentor during intense survival training in the Alaskan wilderness. A firm response to currently accepted dog-training methods.”  — Kirkus Reviews


Raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, Bailey grew to appreciate the wildness of the land and its abundant wildlife. In particular, he developed a fondness for the gray wolves that roamed the vast mountain ranges and forests near his home. Under the guidance of a Special Forces Survival Instructor, he spent years studying the social interactions of wolves in their packs and discovered that, beyond obvious physical similarities, there were also behavioral similarities between the wolves and the sled dogs that were his family’s pets. Bryan has traveled to over thirty countries in Europe, Africa, the jungles of southeast Asia and the remote regions above the arctic circle in his pursuit of learning the behaviors of hyenas, lions, tigers and the gray wolf, with an emphasis on how instinct, passed from the gray wolf, has affected the behavior of our domestic dogs.

Bailey and wife Kira own ProTrain Memphis and Taming the Wild in Memphis. From their website: “A nationally-recognized, award-winning author and behaviorist, Bryan has studied wolf and other predatory behaviors worldwide. He has been featured on CNN, ‘Fox & Friends,’ SiriusXM radio, ‘Talk of Alabama,’ WREG TV-3, and in many publications, including Dog World, At Home Mid-South Tennessee, Bloom Magazine, HOSS magazine, SheKnows, The Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald. Veterinarians, dog owners and celebrities such as John Mellencamp, James Fitzpatrick, the late Junior Seau, Julio Jones and many others have eagerly sought out his services.” 

Bryan Bailey
The Booksellers at Laurelwood
Saturday, March 19th
2:00 p.m.

Trouble Boys is the first definitive, no-holds-barred biography of one of the last great bands of the twentieth century: The Replacements. With full participation from reclusive singer and chief songwriter Paul Westerberg, bassist Tommy Stinson, guitarist Slim Dunlap, and the family of late band co-founder Bob Stinson, author Bob Mehr is able to tell the real story of this highly influential group, capturing their chaotic, tragic journey from the basements of Minneapolis to rock legend. Drawing on years of research and access to the band’s archives at Twin/Tone Records and Warner Bros., Mehr also discovers previously unrevealed details from those in the group’s inner circle, including family, managers, and musical friends and 
collaborators.

“Bob Mehr’s raucous, ribald, and oft-times harrowing book takes us behind the scenes, to the bottom of the bottle, all the way to the end of the road, and then further still—revealing the story of the Replacements, a band that gave away its soul on every record and refused to sell its soul to a corporate world.” —Robert Gordon, author of Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion

Tuesday, March 1st
6:30 p.m.
The Booksellers at Laurelwood
387 Perkins Road Extended

As everyone with any current culture awareness knows, Room is the Best Picture-nominated, and Best Actress-winning (Brie Larson) movie of this week’s Academy Awards ceremony. 

This blog post is not in any way about that movie, but it is why I was confused when Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, contacted me today to tell me that someone connected with the film had been booked for this September’s Mid-South Book Festival.

I am clearly on the low end of pop-culture consciousness because The Room, as it turns out (with its all-important article), is the cult classic starring Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero. Dean implored me to stop whatever it was I was doing (poking around Facebook) and get a copy, as though this journalistic locomotive might be so quickly halted. “It’s epic,” he reiterated. 

The Room has been called “the best worst movie ever made” and “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” And people love it. In fact, it sells out showings all over the place and fans have watch parties in their homes. 

The book The Disaster Artist is a bestselling look behind the scenes of the making of the movie that cost $6 million to produce and earned a total of $1,800 at the box office. From Goodreads: “Readers need not have seen The Room to appreciate its costar Greg Sestero’s account of how Tommy Wiseau defied every law of artistry, business, and interpersonal relationships to achieve the dream only he could love. While it does unravel mysteries for fans, The Disaster Artist is more than just an hilarious story about cinematic hubris: It is ultimately a surprisingly inspiring tour de force that reads like a page-turning novel, an open-hearted portrait of a supremely enigmatic man who will capture your heart.”

“We are excited to add Greg Sestero to the Mid-South Book Festival,” Dean told me. “Cult film enthusiasts will be thrilled to know that his presentation at the festival will be free and open to the public, and we are working with Indie Memphis to have a screening of the film before the festival. Even more exciting is that the movie version of The Disaster Artist will open in theaters one month after our festival.” That film version is directed by and stars James Franco.

The announcement of Sestero comes on the heels of the news that Lauren Groff, author of the bestselling Fates and Furies, will also be a part of the fall festival. In only its second year, 2015’s event saw 80 authors and 5,000 attendees. And that’s way more than attended the first run showing of The Room when it was released in 2003. 

Ed Tarkington will visit story booth at Crosstown Arts this Thursday for a discussion of his debut novel, Only Love Can Break Your Heart.


Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977. Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. Sixteen and full of rebel cool, Paul spends his days cruising in his Chevy Nova blasting Neil Young, cigarette

 dangling from his lips, arm slung around his beautiful, troubled girlfriend. Paul is happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick. Then one day, in an act of vengeance against their father, Paul picks up Rocky from school and nearly abandons him in the woods. Afterward, Paul disappears.



Seven years later, Rocky is a teenager himself. He hasn’t forgotten being abandoned by his boyhood hero, but he’s getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbors’ daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. Unbeknownst to both of them, their affair will set in motion a course of events that rains catastrophe on both their families. After a mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, Rocky and his family must reckon with the past and find out how much forgiveness their hearts can hold.

Praise for Only Love Can Break Your Heart:

“A lush mystery-within-a-coming-of-age-tale-within-a-Southern-Gothic. If a book could have an Instagram filter, Tarkington’s would be set on something called ‘Nostalgic’ . . . interesting, readable and beautifully written.”—NPR Books



“Tarkington’s writing is talky, devoid of flash, and calls to mind a young Pat Conroy . . . propulsion is its primary attribute. Not mere plot propulsion—though there’s plenty of that, especially after the corpses turn up—but emotional propulsion: Tarkington’s fidelity to period and place is matched by his fidelity to human contradictions, to the gray area between heroism and villainy in which most of us reside. The gothic elements add spice, but the protein in this assured debut—the part that sticks to your ribs—is the beautiful but ever-threatened connection between Rocky and Paul. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a novel about brotherhood, most of all, about the delicate fortress of that bond.” — Garden & Gun



“Well-written and observed  . . . Tarkington carefully lays out his elaborate storyline and sensitively depicts his troubled characters.” — Kirkus Reviews

Ed Tarkington
story booth
438 N. Cleveland Street
Thursday, February 11th
6 – 8 p.m.