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

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Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize

Winner of the 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/TODAYShow book club pickLate Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkls 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 new collection.

People have often asked me how it feels to be the voice of the South, writes Renkl in her introduction. But Im not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either. There are many Southsred and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brownand 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 worlds beings (NPR), Graceland, At Lastis a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

Reviews

Praise for Graceland, At Last

Margaret Renkls weekly essays for theNew York Timesoffer a model for how to move through our world with insight and sensitivity.Graceland, At Lasttakes in the full scope of her surroundings, and the reader walks away wanting to see as she sees, hear what she hears, smell what she smells. Its a stellar collection that spans nature writing and cultural criticism, the present and the past, full of explorations of religion, belief, and Southern politics that flex a cordial, probing curiosity. She picks good heroesJohn Lewis, John Prine, the lowly Tennessee coneflowerand she makes sharp judgments without sounding judgmental. At a moment of extreme division, Renkl writes with a generosity of spirit, as a neighbor rather than ideologue.PEN America Judges Citation, Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

[Graceland, At Last] is Renkl at her most tender and most fierce. . . . Renkls gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations, is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart. . . . What rises in me after reading her essays is [John] Lewis famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just thatand through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.NPR

In this luminous collection, Renkl delivers smart, beautifully crafted personal and political observations. . . . I keep this book nearby to revisit the humanity and hope in its pages.Minneapolis Star Tribune

Renkls perspective feels like a guiding light. . . . No matter where youre from, column after column, Margaret Renkl will make you feel right at home.Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Amazing and inspiring. [Graceland, At Last] will help you figure out concrete things you can do to save the planet.Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

Graceland, At Last gathers a selection of Renkls columns from the past four years, inviting loyal readers and newcomers alike to take in Renkls perspective on the world. . . . Whether extolling the wonders of a rattlesnake or lamenting Southern Christians support of oppressive policies, Renkl engages with her home regions beauty and complexity.BookPage

Everyone should have a friend like Margaret Renkl: thoughtful, engaged, compassionate and, above all, acutely observant. Since thats not always possible, the next best thing is to share her company in the diverse and consistently stimulating essay collection Graceland, At Last. . . . Renkl is both unfailingly honest and deeply empathetic in creating the vivid portrait of her home region that emerges organically from these intensely personal and well-informed essays.Shelf Awareness

Reading the short essays in this book has strengthened my understanding and love for the South, its people, its land, and its complexities. I especially have enjoyed reading Renkls thoughtful reflections on flora and fauna, and I find myself looking to my changing backyard this fall with a new appreciation.Garden & Gun, New Reads for Fall 2021

[Renkl] doesnt shy from hard topics but explores them with the careful hand of someone whose heart yearns for healing, growth, and understanding for the region she loves. A must read for those who live and love the South!Country Living, Best Books of Fall 2021

As the essays collected in Graceland, At Last prove, shes challenged her readers to rise and confront many of the complex issues facing our Southern communities. . . . Renkl, an Alabama native and lifelong Southerner living in Nashville, does so with such deep respect and understanding, and such powerful, insightful, Southern-accented prose, that even her polemics come off as love letters. . . . We catch glimpses of ourselves in her wise and poignant reflections, and I for one am grateful and grinning.Charleston Post and Courier

In her newest book, Graceland, At Last, Renkl invites readerssoutherners and non-southerners alikeinto her homeland, her city, her yard. . . . What we discover along the way is a place that is both damaged and damaging, but also full of people who inspire and landscapes too beautiful for words. Through these warm and heartfelt essays, Renkl shows us how to keep on loving this complicated place, how to look right at its appalling truths and gesture, still, toward hope.Southern Humanities Review

While [Graceland, At Last] is not a how-to, we come away with how to better belong to one another in a time when we desperately need to.Arkansas International

From her home in Nashvillea blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee[Renkl] writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled. . . . Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, red-dirt pineywoods, marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves. . . . A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.Kirkus Reviews

If youve happened upon the poignant and off-road opinion pieces Renkl writes as a contributor to The New York Times, you already know that the natural world is something she closely observes and uses as a springboard to contemplate other, less tangible subjects. . . . Her life story and her lifes passion intertwine, like a fence post and a trumpet vine.Maureen Corrigan, NPRs Fresh Air

Graceland, At Last takes us to Renkls homeland and shines a light on life in the South, its complexities and its hopes. In these pages, you will find Black Lives Matter organizers, churches sheltering the homeless, and even helpful sheep. Reading Margaret Renkl is like seeing the world in color for the first time.Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2021

New York Times columnist Renkl effectively lifts the lid on Southern culture and challenges its stereotypes in this versatile compendium. Renkls essays cover the natural world, local politics, Southern-fried art and culture, and social justice issues from a Nashvillian perspective. Her nature writing shows an impressive predilection for botany and ornithology. . . . [Graceland, At Last] serves as a well-written collection for anyone interested in everyday life below the Mason-Dixon Line.Publishers Weekly

Like nothing else in the newspaper, [Renkls columns] burst with awareness of the things of nature, awareness that our lives are led in that midst, permeated with and part of the natural world. All is written with an open, joyful, yet steady voice of wonder.Philadelphia Inquirer

In 1956, author E.B. White suggested that newspapers cover nature as eagerly as commerce, having columns devoted not only to the flow of business but also the arrival of birds. Renkl . . . seems like a belated answer to White . . . [crafting] graceful sentences that White would surely have enjoyed. A collection of her Times columns would be a welcome thing.Wall Street Journal

Renkl is a master prose stylist, her generations E.B. White. Whatever she writes about comes alive through carefully crafted sentences in which sound and sense harmonize at the highest levels.California Review of Books

Renkl is so likable, as a writer and an individual, with her rich family traditions, her concern for justice, and her observant and unsentimental love of nature, that every paragraph feels like a conversation with a friend.Brevity

Its heartening to see a columnist for a major American newspaper writing regularly about nature with a passion the medias chattering classes typically reserve only for politics and entertainment. . . . Renkls columns deserve to be read again, and for years to come.Christian Science Monitor

Renkls essays alternate between balm for the soul and outrage at the world with all of its injustices. She makes me think and see things in a different light and for that Im eternally grateful.Indie Next List (September 2021), selected by Jayne Gowsam, Mystery to Me

Readers can easily home in on one of the books wide-ranging six sections, sample an essay or two from each, or barrel through from start to finish, as whim dictates. Renkls voice is calm, steady, and sometimes surprising. . . . She celebrates a host of new voices in southern writing and sees in their work the light of justice and hope for the South.Booklist

Renkl is one of my absolute favorite writers working today. Like Late Migrations before it, Graceland, At Last is a giftfull of sorrow, joy, grief, and yeshope. I implore you to read her work.Alex Brubaker, Midtown Scholar Bookstore

Renkl is my favorite essayist. Every week I look for her column in the opinion pages of the New York Times. In a time when the country has such deep divisions, I can rely on her writing to be all heart, no snark. Im so proud to have this fellow Nashvillians newest collection on my shelf.Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books

Renkl wrote a favorite book of mine, Late Migrations, which was published in 2019. In this collection of essays, she expands upon what being a Southerner means to her, and not surprisingly I loved it. She writes about nature, her Christian faith, politics, systemic racism, musicians, and a variety of cultural influencers that are a rich variety of her reflections being raised in Alabama and as an adult living in Nashville. Through it all she searches with compassion and empathy for common ground so that all people can aspire to and live a better life.Todd Miller, Arcadia Books

The only thing

Author Bio

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.