Author event with John T. Edge

Parnassus Books is thrilled to present an evening with John T. Edge to celebrate his new book, House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, in conversation with Margaret Renkl.

This ticketed event will take place at Parnassus Books (3900 Hilllsboro Pike, Suite 14, Nashville, TN 37215) on Wednesday, August 13th, at 6:30 PM.

All books will be pre-signed, and there will be a signing line for personalizations after the event.

Additional signed copies of House of Smoke will be available for purchase at the store while supplies last.

Tickets:

$33.00 - includes one general admission seat and one signed copy of House of Smoke.

Parking:

There is ample free parking in front of the store, as well as in the lot and garage behind the store.

About the book:

The author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South tells his own story this time. Of growing up in a house wrecked by violence and a South haunted by racism. And of how his search for home led him to find escape and belonging through food. Until he realizes that gathering at table is just one small step toward reckoning.

In this unflinching and moving memoir, John T. Edge takes us on a quest for home in a South that has both held him close and pushed him away, as he tries and fails and tries again to rewrite the stories he inherited. Born in a house where a Confederate general took his first breath and the Lost Cause narrative was gospel, troubled by the violence he witnessed as a boy, Edge ran from his past, searching for a newer and better South. As founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a contributor to newspapers and magazines, he told stories that showcased those possibilities.

In the process, Edge became one of the most visible and powerful voices in American food...until he found himself denounced by the audience he once guided, faced down the limits of his work, and returned to his origins to find himself once again. Beginning in Georgia and ending in Mississippi, his search spans the Deep South and charts a very American story of the truth telling and soul searching it takes to love your people and your place.

About the author:

John T. Edge writes and hosts the Emmy Award-winning television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, Disney, and Hulu. Edge also writes a restaurant column for Garden & Gun. His 2017 book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and Publishers Weekly. Edge serves the University of Mississippi as a teacher, writer-in-residence, and director of the Mississippi Lab. And he serves the University of Georgia as a mentor in their low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs.

About Margaret Renkl:

Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.