Biography

Odie Lindsey’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Iowa Review, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, Southern Spaces, Guernica and elsewhere, and he received a Tennessee Arts Council fellowship in Literature. A combat veteran, his related story collection, We Come to Our Senses, was published by W.W. Norton in 2016, with a novel to follow next year. Lindsey teaches at Vanderbilt University. 

Schedule

1:15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
State Capitol, Senate Committee Room A
Discussion
Celebrating Short Stories

2:45 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

We Come to Our Senses: Stories

For readers of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Redeployment, a searing debut exploring the lives of veterans returning to their homes in the South.

Lacerating and lyrical, We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war. The story “Evie M.” is about a vet turned office clerk whose petty neuroses derail even her suicide; in “We Come to Our Senses,” a hip young couple leaves the city for the sticks, trading film festivals for firearms; in “Colleen” a woman redeploys to her Mississippi hometown, and confronts the superior who abused her at war; and in “11/19/98” a couple obsesses over sitcoms and retail catalogs, extracting joy and deeper meaning. The story “Hers” is about the sexual politics of a combat zone.