Discussions with authors, lecturers, and other speakers coming to Knoxville.

• Q&A: Fox News Commentator Greg Gutfeld Published 11/28/2012 at 10:59 a.m. 4 comments

  Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s coming to town to promote his new book, The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph Over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage, which claims that the left pretends to be tolerant but isn’t—at least ...

• Q&A: Novelist Adam Johnson Published 10/24/2012 at 10:23 a.m. 0 comments

  Johnson is a professor at Stanford whose previous works—the short-story collection Emporium and the 2003 novel Parasites Like Us—have tended toward the fantastic. His new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, is no less fantastic, all the more so for its ...

• Q&A: Climber and Activist Alan Arnette Published 10/3/2012 at 4:14 p.m. 0 comments

  Not long after Alan Arnette started climbing mountains, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. After she died, in 2009, the technology executive set out on his most ambitious climbing adventure, and hooked it to a campaign to raise awareness ...

• Q&A: Author Bobbie Ann Mason Published 9/5/2012 at 10:05 a.m. 0 comments

  Bobbie Ann Mason may still live in Kentucky, but she doesn’t like to think of herself as a Southern writer anymore. Her earliest, award-winning works—the collection Shiloh and Other Stories and the novel In Country—were set in Western Kentucky, where ...

• Q&A: Lenoir City teacher James Yoakley Published 9/5/2012 at 9:02 a.m. 1 comment

  It was not a good spring for James Yoakley. The Lenoir City High School English teacher first found himself embroiled in controversy in February, when the school’s administration rejected a column written by the student newspaper editor, Krystal Myers, titled ...

• Q&A: Jane Maas, the Real-Life Peggy Olson Published 6/27/2012 at 3:51 p.m. 0 comments

  Jane Maas has been called the real-life Peggy Olson, although for that statement to be entirely true, Peggy will have to end up as president of a major advertising agency by the end of her career. Like Olson, Maas started ...

• Q&A: Novelist Bryan Charles Published 5/30/2012 at 11:12 a.m. 0 comments

  Bryan Charles is relatively new to Knoxville, but he’s not new to writing. His first novel, Grab on to Me Tightly as If I Knew the Way, came out in 2006, and his monograph on Pavement’s album Wowee Zowee for ...

• Grassroots Documentary Project 'One Day on Earth' Makes its Way to Knoxville Published 4/17/2012 at 3:20 p.m. 0 comments

  On Oct. 10, 2010, thousands of people from every country on Earth picked up their video cameras and participated in what organizers hope to be a continuing event in global culture. That footage has now been compiled into the feature ...

• Q&A: Performance Artist Christian Cox Published 4/4/2012 at 10:58 a.m. 0 comments

  Christian Cox is a Knoxville-based artist and designer who has recently branched out into performance. His first set this year found a roomful of eager Royal Bangs fans running the anti-comedy gauntlet of hack standup “Garry Plimpton,” to the bemusement ...

• Q&A: Ultrahiker Andrew Skurka Published 3/14/2012 at 10:08 a.m. 0 comments

  Andrew Skurka has logged 30,000 miles of long-distance hiking and has refined walking in the woods to a science. Now he has distilled his hard-earned outdoor skills and insight into the recently published book The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide (National ...

• Q&A: Comedian Steven Wright Published 3/7/2012 at 10:21 a.m. 0 comments

  Steven Wright first rose to prominence in the 1980s as a kind of anti-comedian; his deadpan style, unruly haircut, and absurdist observational one-liners were completely unlike any other comedy at the time. Wright has only released two albums during his ...

• Q&A: Christopher Hebert, author of 'The Boiling Season' Published 2/29/2012 at 1:59 p.m. 0 comments

  Christopher Hebert may be best known around Knoxville as a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, but all of that is about to change with the publication of his first book, The Boiling Season (Harper).

• Q&A: Novelist Josh Weil Published 2/22/2012 at 11:12 a.m. 0 comments

  Weil’s protagonists are really alone—so alone it hurts. Touches of a modern Southern Gothic pop up now and again, which is probably why Weil has been compared to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. But his novellas aren’t about violence, they’re ...

• Q&A: Keltie Ferris, UT artist in residence Published 11/23/2011 at 11:50 a.m. 0 comments

  Keltie Ferris got her MFA in painting at Yale, and already has pieces in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City.

• Q&A: Historian Jay Rubenstein Published 11/9/2011 at 9:56 a.m. 0 comments

  University of Tennessee history professor and MacArthur Fellow Jay Rubenstein’s new book, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, is a detailed account of the First Crusade and an analysis of the religious and political conditions ...

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