Humanities Tennessee will host a reading and book signing with author John Jeremiah Sullivan at the Nashville Public Library on Saturday, November 19. Sullivan’s new book Pulphead: Essays is an eclectic collection of magazine pieces from GQ, Paris Review, and others.
Sullivan serves as the Southern editor for Paris Review, and as a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, as well as a writer-at-large for GQ. His piece "Horseman, Pass By" (Harper's, 2002) won the 2003 National Magazine Award for feature writing, and he is also the author of the book Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son.
Sullivan's new collection contains piece ranging from subjects as diverse as the writer Andrew Lytle to Sullivan’s experience of having his Wilmington, North Carolina house used as a set on the TV series One Tree Hill.
Dwight Garner of the New York Times says of Sullivan: "Most of the essays in Pulphead are haunted … by what Mr. Sullivan refers to with only slight self-mockery as 'the tragic spell of the South.' The book has its grotesques, for sure. But they are genuine and appear here in a way that put me in mind of one of Flannery O'Connor's indelible utterances. 'Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,' O'Connor said. 'I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.'"
Sullivan’s reading will take place at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church St, on Saturday Nov. 19 at 1:00 p.m. in the library conference center. The event is free, with no registration required. Book sales will be available, with a signing to follow the reading.
