Tag: Novel bookstore

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Tara M. Stringfellow Launches Memphis at Novel Bookstore

Author Tara M. Stringfellow is a poet, a traveler, a former attorney, a Memphian, and she will launch her debut novel — Memphis — Tuesday, April 5th, with an event at Novel bookstore.

The novel follows three generations of Black women living in Memphis. It’s at once a family saga, a story of the power of art, and a deeply political social commentary. There is much pain in Memphis, but there is hope and triumph as well. It is a heart-wrenching, inspiring, moving novel. And to write it, Stringfellow drew on both her imagination and her own experiences.

“Kind of like my main character in the book, I moved here full-time when I was 10 [years old],” Stringfellow says. Before moving here, she remembers phone calls with family members in Memphis; until she was 10 years old, Stringfellow lived in Okinawa, Japan. Her father, who is also a poet, was a Marine at the time. The author says the beauty of her childhood surroundings and her connection to family in Memphis helped nourish her love for poetry. And her work as a poet suffuses every page of her debut novel.

Also like Joan, the main character in Memphis, Stringfellow says that she has strong ties to her old neighborhood in North Memphis. “Douglass kind of raised me for a bit, and I loved it,” she remembers. Community is a powerful force in her novel, as exemplified by this passage: “All of Douglass—the teenagers in love, the tired working men, the even more tired womenfolk—all of them stood on the steps of the porch Myron had built for Hazel, stood on the lawn, climbed up the branches of the magnolia and found seats where they could. The people in the neighborhood stood watch that night.”

Stringfellow finished writing the novel after returning to Memphis following the early months of the Covid pandemic. She says it felt right to complete it here. When she finished the book, she couldn’t help but think, “What has my family given for me to get here?”

In Memphis, Joan is a young painter whose love for her art both grounds her through some turbulent trials, and might eventually lead her away from Memphis. “I do connect to Joan in that way,” she says. “My passion for writing, I wanted her to have the same passion for art.” Stringfellow says she believes that Joan will carry Memphis with her wherever she goes. “Memphis will always be there in her home. And sometimes we have to leave home, to go to school or go somewhere. And I feel like it’s so nice to come back home.”

Though she has lived in other cities, states, and countries since her childhood, and though she lives in a different neighborhood now that she’s back in Memphis, Stringfellow is quick to profess her affection for the city from which her novel takes its name. “I love my neighborhood,” she says. “All my neighbors are real diverse, and we all just kind of take care of each other. I really do love living in Memphis.” Look for a longer interview with the author in the near future in the pages of the Flyer.

Tara M. Stringfellow is at Novel, Tuesday, April 5th, 6 p.m.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

In Autumn, Meanwhile Back

Photo: Jesse Davis

When the stars align, usually on a rainy Sunday in late autumn or early winter when he’s still a little punch drunk from the end of Daylight Saving Time and the end-of-year blurring of the calendar, the editor sleeps in.

After a Saturday spent writing and then helping a friend move, he sleeps in on Sunday. After tumbling out of bed and stumbling to the kitchen, he sets coffee brewing, opens the blinds, and watches as the rain dimples the surface of the creek next door. He and his fiancée sit and watch their cats watching the birds sitting on still-leafy branches, their feathers fluffed against the rain.

Later, the couple bundle themselves against the late-autumn cold and leave the house. After realizing that the Memphis weather is being Memphis weather again — it feels more like April than December — they clomp back inside and shed a layer.

The editor drives, and the two go out on the town for a day of Christmas shopping. They don’t often have days off together, so it’s An Event.

At a local bookstore, they buy a book about bees, a stack of car magazines, a sweater, and the fourth and final book (translated from French) of a fantasy series. The editor sees an old friend, and she says nice things about the newspaper. He says he hopes her sister is well. They recognize each other despite wearing masks and, in her case, big sunglasses.

After a brief diversion — stopping at a grocery store for dinner ingredients, dropping said supplies off at home — they go to a plant store and nursery. The editor picks out more gifts, and his fiancée coos over the shop’s resident cat, Bunny. More businesses should have a cat, the editor thinks. They pile their gifts-to-be on the counter and pay for them, chatting with the friendly clerk about science-fiction films and cats. The clerk’s cats, it turns out, are named after characters from sci-fi films.

Their last stop for the day is an antiques store on Summer Avenue. The editor’s father is planning on moving back to Memphis early next year. The father will need some furniture, and the editor believes in practical gifts. The editor’s not worried about including that in his column because his father, for the moment at least, lives outside the newspaper’s circulation radius. The editor, for the time being at least, could include an itemized list of gifts, and his father would be none the wiser. The father doesn’t use the internet and still owns a flip-phone, so the editor figures there’s no chance of the surprise being ruined via social media either. It’s the perfect crime.

In the antiques store, the fiancée finds some gifts, along with a burnt-orange sweater and a wooden desk tray, the kind one might use to hold correspondence. She’s a fiend for fall colors; she’s mad about organization. She also finds a corner shelf, the exact kind the editor has been on the hunt for, to be a new home for some houseplants. They must be kept out of his cats’ reach. They murder houseplants with extreme prejudice.

The editor dusts off the corner shelf, examines it from every angle, and checks the price tag. They’re here to buy gifts, not furniture for themselves, he reasons. As he’s vetting the shelf, the editor sees someone he recognizes — above the face mask, that is. He’s a local musician, drummer for a half-dozen Bluff City bands. They say hello. The editor invites the drummer to examine the shelf, which the drummer judges to be a fine shelf indeed. The editor caves. He buys the shelf. He finds his fiancée and helps her carry her purchases to the car.

Back home, the editor wraps presents while his fiancée cooks soup. Usually soup is a meal they prepare together, but they don’t mind slight variations in their habits. Most days, they wake early; today they slept in. The editor puts on a playlist of tunes by The Beatles. He’s been on a Fab Four kick, courtesy of the Peter Jackson documentary Get Back.

If he were Paul McCartney, he thinks, he could turn today into a little third-person story song. “Penny Lane, the barber shaves another customer,” he sings to himself. “On Summer Ave., the salesman sells another antique shelf.”

It’s no “Yesterday,” he thinks, but it’s a nice song to live.

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Book Features Books

Satanic Panic Redux: Clay McLeod Chapman’s Whisper Down the Lane

Lil Nas X, the rapper who rocked boats by blending hip-hop and country music in “Old Town Road,” seems to have ushered in a renaissance of the Satanic Panic with the angels-and-demons iconography in the music video for the recently released “Montero (Call Me by Your Name).” If, like me, you have evangelical aunts and uncles with access to the internet, you know that the video is a sure sign that Satan is real and he’s out to get the children.

Well, if we have to do the Satanic Panic again, at least we have books to go with it. Clay McLeod Chapman’s Whisper Down the Lane (Quirk Books), released this Tuesday, could hardly be more timely. What’s more, Chapman will discuss the novel online tonight (Thursday, April 8th) via webinar as part of Novel bookstore’s Reader Meet Writer series of events. 

The book alternates between chapters set in 1983 and in 2013, following young Sean and the fully grown Richard. But Sean and Richard are the same person, 30 years and a scandal apart and after a name change to give young Sean/Richard some chance at a semblance at a normal life. But it seems, as Satanic imagery begins to pop up at the elementary school where Richard teaches, that his past has come back to haunt him. 

There are shades of The Crucible in Whisper Down the Lane, making it an excellent companion novel to Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors, published earlier this year. The novel centers around the ease with which the seed of a lie can take root and grow and thrive. The most true-to-life moments are young Sean’s interactions with his single mother, and how her unmarried status makes her a pariah. Her stress, her absolute need to never make a mistake because the eyes of the community are always on her, and the panic that fosters in Sean, felt true and tragic. 

Chapman crafts a horrific tragedy, built on misunderstandings and the best intentions. The novel is all the more compelling for its lack of an obvious villain. Of course, there’s no reason to take my word for it. 
Clay McLeod Chapman discusses Whisper Down the Lane online via Novel bookstore’s Reader Meet Writer series, Thursday, April 8th, at 6 p.m. The event is free with registration.

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Book Features Books

Psycho Street: Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors

This week’s column faces me with a happy predicament — how to write critically about a book I unequivocally loved? Some novels are puzzle boxes, devices of impossible intricacy meant to delight the intellect. Some take a different form — a raw, beating heart, oozing pathos and humanity. Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors (Simon & Schuster) is both things, and more. It wrecked me, left me in tears twice, and if the past three days are any indication, Good Neighbors will live rent-free in my mind for a long time to come.

When the novel opens, the Wilde family has already worn out its welcome on suburban Maple Street. It isn’t anything they did, exactly. Sure, they could stand to take better care of their lawn, but it’s really about who they are.

Arlo Wilde, charting-musician-turned-office-supply-salesperson, with monster-movie-themed tattoos covering his track marks, likes to sit on the front porch and burn through packs of Parliaments. Gertie freezes up in social situations, leaving a big, fake smile on her face, a remnant from her beauty pageant days. She wears cheap jewelry, and her shirts are cut too low. Larry, their youngest, is going through a phase — he’s bright, but socially, he’s developing slowly. And poor Julia, pimply and pubescent, had to move to a new town at life’s most awkward stage, and now finds herself trying to fit in with a group of kids who’ve known each other since before they could speak.

As a family, the Wildes are damaged but brave, ever attempting to rise above hidden scars far more grisly than Arlo’s track marks.

David Zaugh, Zaugh Photography

Sarah Langan

When the novel begins, with a Fourth of July block party, Maple Street’s de facto leader Rhea Schroeder is on the outs with Gertie, ostensibly her best friend. In fact, both the Wilde women are feuding with the Schroeders, it seems, as there’s friction between Julia and Rhea’s daughter, Shelly. That drama is upstaged, though, when a sinkhole opens up in the park that borders the neighborhood. Ominous, hinting at hidden dangers, it spews candy-apple-scented fumes, a clear indication that something deadly lurks, hidden, under Maple Street.

Somehow, about a month after the novel’s beginning, the resentment bubbling under the surface of Maple Street overflows and leads to a series of murders. Good Neighbors makes no bones about that — each page takes the reader inexorably closer to catastrophe.

Langan could teach a master class in suspense. She peppers the plot with interstitial chapters taken from “real-life” newspaper clippings, articles, and Hollywood Babylon-style books about the infamous Maple Street Murders. As a result, every plot point feels tragically inevitable.

“There’s this thing that happens to people who’ve grown up with violence. It changes their hardwiring,” Langan writes. “They don’t react to threats like regular civilians. They do extremes. They’re too docile over small things but they go apeshit over the big stuff. In other words, they’re prone to violence.”

Langan lays out her pieces with a watchmaker’s precision, setting up the circumstances that lead to the Maple Street Murders. What’s terrifying is how common those circumstances turn out to be. In Good Neighbors, they’re newish neighbors who don’t quite fit in, a sinkhole, an oppressive and record-breaking heatwave, a tanked economy (glimpsed in the margins), a worsening environmental crisis, and a family with secrets. It’s generational trauma and PTSD and a community, a microcosm of America, struggling under the weight of these intersectional crises.

In other words, it could happen here, too.
Novel at Home: Sarah Langan with Grady Hendrix, authors in conversation in live online launch party for Good Neighbors, Tuesday, February 2nd, at 6 p.m. Event is free with registration.

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Book Features Books

Susan Bacon’s The History Teacher

During the blizzard of 1978, a woman is discovered face down at the edge of her Delaware estate. When a young Columbia University professor, Emma, gets a phone call informing her of her grandmother’s death, she’s drawn into a web of intrigue that reaches into CIA meeting rooms and the New York’s Upper West Side. It’s a lot for a history teacher to handle.

Susan Bacon

So begins The History Teacher, the debut novel from writer and Memphian Susan Bacon. Though the new novel of Cold War-era intrigue is her debut as a novelist, Bacon is no stranger to working as a writer. She’s a journalist, ghost writer, and an award-winning copy writer, and she will celebrate her debut as a novelist with a booksigning at Novel bookstore Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m.

Originally from Delaware, Bacon moved to New York, where she studied at Barnard College before working, for a time, at a magazine there. After her time in the Big Apple, she moved to Memphis, left to work in Washington, D.C., and then returned to the Bluff City. “That’s my trajectory,” she says.

In college, Bacon studied history, and her concentration was contemporary European history, which comes into play in The History Teacher. “I had intended to study journalism in college, but I went to Barnard College in New York and they didn’t have a journalism program,” she explains. “So I just went ahead and studied history, and then I went I worked for a magazine briefly in New York.”

“I’ve written several books on my own, and then I have ghost written some books,” Bacon says. “I started out as a journalist here in Memphis at Memphis magazine.” She has written speeches and books about the politics of parenting, and she has ghostwritten books as well. Are Our Kids All Right?, her second book is, of her nonfiction, her personal favorite. “It was a pretty heavily researched book on the quality of child-care in the United States.”

All that time, ideas were quietly gestating. Settings from Delaware, bits of history, politics, and academia — though The History Teacher is by no means an autobiographical novel, Bacon’s experiences have informed it.

Perhaps owing to her history degree or her work as a journalist, meticulous research is still a part of Bacon’s process. “I sprinkle news stories throughout the book. I tried to do a lot of research so that the history is accurate. In the end, I ended up weaving in an awful lot of reality.” Still, she says, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel. It’s really a treat for me. I had an awful lot of fun. As you may know, it’s hard to be tied to facts all the time.”

Still, though Bacon draws much of the novel from her imagination, there’s a strong foundation of fact and history that makes The History Teacher feel grounded in reality.

“Back in the ’90s, when I was in Washington, between my two books, I got really interested in the Alger Hiss case.” Hiss was an American government official who was accused of being a Soviet Union spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with the charge in 1950. “That was a long time ago, but I kept the manuscript I was working on and that became the seed for this story. When I first moved to Memphis, I wrote a novel, kind of an experiment, and I put that in a drawer and then I said I’m going to take that Hiss story and I’m going to build something from it.”

Bacon also took inspiration from the classic thrillers of the 1970s, and there’s a whiff of the Cold War espionage of John Le Carré. Don’t misunderstand. The History Teacher stands on its own, but there are familiar notes. For one thing, I don’t remember The Spy Who Came in from the Cold starring a young professor. Bacon subtly sidesteps stereotypes as she introduces her cast of characters. Emma, CIA agents, no one feels flat or manufactured. Emma is an excellent example. Rather than invent a private investigator or a spy, Bacon chooses a professor as her protagonist. She’s not exactly a detective, but she is a historian. Research is her bread and butter. She’s no stranger to the long struggle to uncover the truth.

All in all, Bacon has crafted a satisfying page-turner with her debut, and the ending is perhaps the most satisfying facet of all. No spoilers here, but this is no tea cozy mystery devoid of real consequences and implications. The novel examines the cost of privilege and wealth — and the interconnected worlds of politics, business, and high society. It’s well worth a read.

Susan Bacon signs and discusses her debut novel, the political thriller The History Teacher, at Novel, Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m.

For updates on The History Teacher, visit susanbacon.com.