Fact or Fiction?

Intrigue, adventure, ambition, architecture, Memphis – Reviewers say they are all captured in Jim Williamson’s novel, The Architect. Sounds like a must read for all of us.

Williamson, an award winning Memphis architect,will read from and sign copies of his new novel Tuesday, Dec. 4 from 5:30 – 7 pm at Burke’s Book Store (936 S. Cooper). The reading will be at 6 pm next door at Sweet Desserterie. The Architect was published by Cold Tree Press ($16.95 paperback).

Among his many Memphis projects, Mr. Williamson worked with Venturi Scott Brown on the 1987 Memphis Downtown Plan for the Center City Commission. To see the riverfront section of that plan, click here. The award winning architect and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, is a graduate of Rhodes College and the Univ. of Pennsylvania and has taught at Yale, Penn, and Rhodes.

Reviewers comments:

"The Architect is wrapped in the past and present of a mythic Midtown Memphis and beset by a cast of characters rollicking enough for a latter-day Dickens. Under all, the New Madrid Fault rumbles. Then the ruses of people and nature combine to bring about a grand denouement. Oh how we architects will recognize the situations! And some clients may learn how not to behave. But this book can be enjoyed, far beyond the profession, as a picaresque tale of adventure set in intriguing circumstances."
---Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi

"The Architect is a thoughtful, moving novel about the realities of building, particularly when style collides with money, politics, and the demands of the less than enlightened. Also, this interesting portrait of Memphis embodies a lively treatise on architecture itself."
---James Conaway, author of Memphis Afternoons, The Far Side of Eden, and Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes

"The Architect is an exciting story of intrigue, ambition and personal heroics played out in Memphis, a city steeped in the southern traditions of culture and society. Ethan Cotham is a man of talent, principles and derring-do, a towering figure at the heart of this exciting adventure set on the banks of the Mississippi River."
---Louis R. Pounders, Architect