Maybe you’ve said it, maybe someone has said it to you, maybe you learned it from Friday Night Lights, but most Americans know: Marriage takes work.

Running the Rift is a much better novel than The Help, but it suffers from the same problematic issue—can an American white woman write authentically and realistically about the issues faced by blacks? Can someone who lives a life of ...

I wish I could say I liked more books than I did in 2011. I really do. There were so many books I was excited to read, and so few of those lived up to my expectations.

Christmas shopping season is upon is, but there’s no need to stress. Who doesn’t like books? The problem is finding the right one for everyone—books for the nonreader, books for the picky reader, books for the precocious young adult. We ...

CG: I decided this morning that I think The Marriage Plot is not about deconstructing 19th-century novels so much as it is Eugenides’ anxiety about the 20th-century ones.

A preview of 'The Obed: A Climber’s Guide to the Wild and Scenic' by local author Kelly Brown, with photos by Mark Andrew Large.

Naked Wine is not merely an exhortation to embrace vin naturel. Veering between travelogue, history, and a how-to manual, Naked Wine jumps back and forth between Feiring’s attempt to make her own wine using the methods she endorses and her ...

Luckily for Knoxville lovers of literature, this fall provides ample opportunity to get out and mingle with each other. There are readings from locally renowned poets and nationally renowned poets. There are book signings by romance novelists, mystery novelists, and ...

Here we are, in 2011, 300 years after the novel emerged as a real, actual thing in the English language, and the romance is as derided as it was then.

Right now, in the height of tomato season, it seems impossible to think that in just a few short weeks, all our gardens’ bounty will be gone and we will once more be forced to turn to tasteless grocery store ...

It is an overstatement because it seems to denigrate the magical quality of Patchett’s prose to say that it is full of symbols. If there is one thing above all else that makes State of Wonder worth reading, it is ...

Grieving is a universal process, but wading through that morass of grief is something everyone handles differently. Some try to numb the pain with alcohol; others throw themselves into their work. When Meghan O’Rourke’s mother died in 2008, she turned ...

The weathered, harried British private detective Jackson Brodie is hardly traditional hardboiled heartthrob material. He’s adept with wisecracks, but the humor generally eludes whomever he’s speaking to. He likes his whiskey, but not too much of it. He’s divorced and ...

It’s hard to imagine how music in the 20th century would have evolved in quite the same way if, as a sickly child, Alan Lomax had succumbed to one of his many illnesses, or if his chronic ear infections had ...

Now that the pre-release hype has subsided a bit, what remains is an assured and classic story of innocence lost—think Huck Finn with gators, casinos, and the occasional video game.