Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

Written by Margaret Renkl

Narrated by Joyce Bean

Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize

Winner of the 2022 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

An Indie Next Selection for September 2021

A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021

A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2022

A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021

A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781713650973

Margaret Renkl

Margaret Renkl is the author of Graceland, At Last and Late Migrations, which was a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show book club selection. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Proximity, and River Teeth, among others. She was the founding editor of Chapter 16, the daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina. She lives in Nashville.

Reviews for Graceland, At Last

[banjo123 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you read Renkl's wonderful LATE MIGRATIONS, you might be curious about this book. It's not as good. This is a collection of short essays, originally published in the NYT. Some are very good, some are slight and don't seem worthy of a book. (although all would be nice to read in a newspaper!). It doesn't hold together as a book.I was happy to read it, however, for the sense of what it feels like to be a blue voter in a red state, and to love the south, but hate the legacy of slavery. Also, Renkl's nature writing is lovely.