Peggy Burch

Memphis creators of independent books prospered in this year’s awards season.

In his debut novel “Southern Cross the Dog,” Bill Cheng writes in rich detail about a young black man’s escape from the 1927 floodwaters in Issaquena County, Mississippi, to a brothel in the town of Bruce east of the Delta, ...

Though he’s only an occasional visitor now, fiction writer Eric Jerome Dickey still calls Memphis home. By phone from Atlanta this month, Dickey, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s and has been staying in Barbados since last year, ...

It’s hard to ask David Sedaris a question that he hasn’t already answered in the personal essays he’s published over the past 30 years.

Though Jill McCorkle’s new novel, “Life After Life,” is set in a retirement center, its vital characters include an adolescent, young adults and the middle aged, in addition to those near life’s end.

The people at Literacy Mid-South estimate that 5,000 Memphis residents have read “Wonder,” a novel about a 10-year-old with a severe facial deformity who struggles to fit in at middle school.

When the University of Memphis was courting the commissioner of the Big East Conference a year ago, the school’s president and athletic director, along with the founder of FedEx and the former First Tennessee Bank chairman, had steaks with their ...

In 2008 Memphis interior designer Jim Marshall rescued a load of charming nautical relics and installed them at a bar in the center of the developing Broad Avenue Arts District.

Cafe 1912's chef de cuisine Keith Riley knew when he took the job some four years ago that he had to ease into it.

This year’s Literacy Is Key “Book & Author Affair” will bring three novelists with singular personalities — one from Memphis, two from Atlanta — to the podium at the Holiday Inn, University of Memphis on Jan. Thursday.

Aldo's Pizza Pies is filling a gaping hole Downtown, and that's not just a reference to the vast floor space the restaurant occupies.

It was a year of anniversaries and celebrations for the Memphis restaurant community in 2012. Food writer Jennifer Biggs honors the most memorable establishments.

Fresh ingredients set this Memphis Mexican spot a world apart from the competition.

While Molly Caldwell Crosby was conducting research in London for her second work of narrative nonfiction, "Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries," she found the threads of information that would lead to her third book.

The current menu at South of Beale is a carnival of influences. Cajun potatoes. Pork egg rolls. Taco salad with Navajo frybread.

From cocktails to carrot cake, The Majestic Grille on South Main is a comfortable and contemporary place to eat.

In 2006, while she was teaching at the University of Memphis, Mary Leader was the Poet of the Month on poetrynet.org. In the profile of her work on the site, she said that she began writing poetry while she was ...

R.P. Tracks is on the verge of a college campus, which explains why the "Beverages and Libations" menu lists more than 50 shooters, with names like Mind Eraser — vodka, coffee liqueur, soda — and Call A Cab — three ...

Book signings and author appearances in the Mid-South

The fey and eccentric character Miranda July creates as an actress is not really like Miranda July, the author.

>Say the words "best breakfast" to people who dine out in Memphis, and the words "Brother Juniper's" will surely follow. Even if you've never been to the little cottage with a white picket fence on Walker in the University of ...

Memphis architect and writer James Williamson revisits American history and his own past in his novel "The Ravine," set in a small Mississippi town very much like Water Valley, where the author spent summers with his grandparents.

Chickasaw Oaks, the compact mall beside the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library on the west end of the Poplar Corridor, is a daytime retreat for the recession-proof. Ensconced at the center of the mall, Just For Lunch provides a midday ...

It was a Saturday night at New Asia in Germantown, and festive family parties filled the round tables, with diners ranging in age from 7 to 70. The atmosphere was generally merry, but we were feeling anxious. We had already ...

The trio of north Mississippi towns where William Faulkner was born, lived and died form a triangle on territory the reading world knows as Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner was born in New Albany in 1897. When he was 5, he moved ...

Bari, the meticulously maintained restaurant that has lodged for 10 years in a 1915 brick two-story in Overton Square, is a refuge from the slings and arrows of commercial dining. The food served here is elegant, relying on the integrity ...

The voice of THE Sweet Potato Queen comes through even in e-mail.

When you talk to Michael Patrick, the executive chef of Rizzo's Diner who is now also overseeing the menu at Grawemeyer's, you sense that the South Main District is girding to stand and fight for the Memphis entertainment dollar.

Russ Kick is a man on several missions. As editor of the website The Memory Hole, a title taken from George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Kick published U.S. government documents on intelligence and covert action, and reports on scientific ...

Early returns on "Don't Ever Get Old," native Memphian Daniel Friedman's first novel, are good.

A biography of Craig Claiborne by Memphis-born author Thomas McNamee claims we have the 20th-century food writer to thank for rescuing us from bland and canned food.

Mystery writer Charlaine Harris likes to give her heroines a healthy life span.

First the bad news: Fannie Flagg, who wrote "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe," had to cancel her Friday appearance in a Southern writers series at the Hernando branch of Mississippi's First Regional Library system.

Like fictional figures from Jane Eyre to Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, the central character in the new novel by Ron Rash called "The Cove" is defined by her place.

A decade ago, the writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr. took a journey down the Mississippi River for a film called “The Main Stream,” a travelogue he narrates in the soft-edged accent of his native Georgia. He said he wanted ...

On April 4 every year since 1968, Memphis remembers its part as the backdrop to one of history's fateful moments, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel.

The town of Pocahontas, Tenn., 80 miles due east of Memphis with a population of about 1,000, has a starring role in "The Lost Saints of Tennessee," the debut novel of Amy Franklin-Willis.

Nominated in Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories at tonight's Academy Award ceremonies, "The Help" brings Hollywood back to its favorite moment in the South, says University of Memphis communication professor Allison Graham, author of "Framing the ...

A triumphant moment in the 1997 movie "Good Will Hunting" was Matt Damon's verbal barroom takedown of a history grad student that includes the sentence, "You're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia ...

At first glance, the menu at eighty3 food & drink is as dazzling as the room itself, which glows under halogen lights. There are 11 categories on the dinner list -- starting with bar snacks of nuts and bacon, progressing ...

The day Michael Oher signed “I Beat the Odds” a year ago at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, the store sold more than 1,200 copies. Oher’s publisher says 3,500 people attended the event. “That’s still unbelievable,” Oher says of the turnout. Now his ...

At 7 p.m. Saturday night, we were among a couple of dozen people queued up at Ciao Bella near the commercial heart of the Poplar corridor. A man and woman who arrived at the front desk ahead of us heard ...

On tour with the paperback edition of her second novel, "The Lake of Dreams," Kim Edwards will stop in Memphis Thursday to appear at the second annual "Literacy Is Key" event.

During the last 25 years of his life, the photographer and graphic designer Jack Robinson worked in Memphis stained-glass studios, lived alone, and made no effort to inform the people around him about his glamorous past.

Calling one-time Memphian Richard Halliburton “America’s greatest adventurer” sounds like hyperbole — until you read a few chapters of “The Glorious Adventure,” subtitled “Through the Mediterranean in the Wake of Odysseus.”

The 40-year-old University Press of Mississippi is based in Jackson and supported by Mississippi's state universities, but its list of titles often embraces Memphis. Consider "Mayor Crump Don't Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis," for instance, or "You Must Be ...

The Midtown intersection of Peabody and Cooper got a burst of vitality over the past decade as a diverse collection of businesses -- Midtown Yoga, the Eclectic Eye, Café 1912, the Nail and Skin Bar -- moved in and created ...

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote "The Scarlet Letter" 150 years ago, and set it in colonial America 350 years ago, but contemporary author Hillary Jordan had an oddly easy time adapting the story for her current work.

The River City Writers Series will bring author Randall Kenan to the University of Memphis for a reading Monday and an interview Tuesday.

If you're one of those Memphians who winces every time Forbes ranks cities, Richard Murff and Nautilus Publishing of Taylor, Miss., have a book for you. "Memphians" is a full-on counter-offensive to those Forbes' lists that include Memphis among the ...