I’m writing from Mississippi.

I’m here for the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson. A few hours ago, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Alice Randall and Tom Piazza. Our books were about Black country music, John Prine, and college football. If that sounds like a challenging panel to navigate, it wasn’t.

We had John T. Edge to thank for that. Some of y’all might know John T. from his SEC Network show, “TrueSouth.” John T.’s also a brilliant author. In fact, just this month, he released a memoir, House of Smoke. It’s a heck of a story about home, food, and navigating the complexities of the modern South. A stuffed squirrel even shows up at the end.

When I finish this column, I’ll be headed home to Arkansas, and one of my favorite Mississippi-based authors will soon be joining me.

This coming Thursday, William Boyle is scheduled to read at Arkansas Tech University. If you’re around the Russellville area, I hope you’ll come hear Bill discuss his latest novel, Saint of the Narrows Street. The event is scheduled for October 2, 6 pm, in the Ross-Pendergraft Library on ATU’s main campus.

I had the pleasure of reading Saint of the Narrows Street a few months before its publication. I was on a subway car in New York City, my daughter’s head in my lap, when I first cracked this Brooklyn-based novel open. A few pages in, Bill’s characters had returned the favor.

This is a novel that will split your heart at the seams. It’s as good a book as I’ve read in a long, long time. I called it “a hundred-proof shot of tragic love” in my blurb, but it’s so much more than that.

I mark up all the books I read as I read them. I highlight passages that “fox my fever blister,” as Johnny Wink likes to say. Saint of the Narrows Street is in a tie for my most marked-up book of the 2020s.

The novel that it’s tied with is a debut called The Slip by Lucas Schaefer. The Slip came out in June and has been steadily racking up accolades. It’s about a boy who goes missing from an Austin boxing gym in 1998 and the twenty-year search to find him.

There is no way to express the pure power of The Slip in such a condensed space. Lucky for you, dear reader, Lucas is also headed to Arkansas. On Saturday, October 4, you can find Lucas Schaefer in conversation with William Boyle at this year’s Six Bridges Book Festival in Little Rock.

I’ll be moderating the conversation. No spoilers, but if you’re around central Arkansas, this panel will be well worth your time. I promise.

Speaking of Six Bridges panels, I’ll be joining longtime ESPN staff writer Seth Wickersham for the festival. Seth’s new book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, takes a deep dive into all things quarterback by tracing the position from its conception to eventual mythological status.

The conversation will be moderated by Jay Jennings, former “Sports Illustrated” editor and author of Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City. If you’re a football fan, you don’t want to miss this talk (and the Hogs are on a bye week).

See you soon.