The characters in Adam Ross’s new story collection confront the human impulse to cruelty
July 5, 2011 In Ladies and Gentlemen, the follow-up to his critically acclaimed novel, Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross employs beautiful, glittering prose to tell tales of boys and girls behaving badly. Ross will discuss and sign the story collection at the Nashville Public Library on July 5 at 6:15 p.m., as part of the the Salon@615 series.
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With State of Wonder, her sixth novel, Ann Patchett reinvents literary fiction—again
June 22, 2011 Ann Patchett first made bestseller lists with her transcendent 2001 novel, Bel Canto, the story of an international group of businessmen, diplomats, and politicians—and one opera diva—who are held hostage by terrorists in the vice-presidential palace of an unnamed Latin American country. In State of Wonder, Patchett returns to the jungle, this time to the central Amazon basin, a vast but impenetrable landscape where the air “is heavy enough to be bitten and chewed,” and insects fly “with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses” of human beings. There’s a magnificent chapter set in an opera house and the kind of chaotic market scene that’s more or less required of a novel set in an equatorial country, but the real point of this book is to get its protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, out of suburbia, away from her phone, and into “the beating heart of nowhere”—a jungle teeming with spiders, snakes, quicksand, and cannibals. Patchett will discuss State of Wonder at the Nashville Public Library on June 28, 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series.
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Ace Atkins—best known for his historical crime fiction—launches a contemporary series that captures a bleak Southern landscape
June 20, 2011 In The Ranger, veteran crime writer Ace Atkins brings disturbingly to life a Mississippi that is a gothic green hell of ignorance and corruption. Set in fictional Tibbehah County (think Yoknapatawpha thrust into the twenty-first century), the novel introduces Quinn Colson, on leave from yet another combat tour in Afghanistan to bury his uncle, the county sheriff. What Colson finds at home just ain’t right, and he intends to set things straight. Ace Atkins will read from The Ranger on June 21 at 6 p.m. at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.
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Bill Loehfelm’s third novel, set in a seamy corner of Staten Island, is disturbing, dirty—and irresistible
June 14, 2011 Maureen Coughlin—an underdog oppressed by her own low ambition and everyone else’s belief that she’ll never accomplish anything beyond waiting tables—sees something that was never meant for her eyes: either a homoerotic encounter between unlikely lovers, or an only vaguely consensual act meant to satisfy a debt. By the time the answer becomes clear, the 29-year-old protagonist has found herself involved in a murder investigation whose chief suspect is rich, powerful, and a shoo-in for the U.S. Senate. Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil She Knows is a consuming thriller that has it all: sex, politics, class warfare, and an unlikely hero impossible not to root for. Loehfelm will sign books at 6 p.m. on June 14 at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis.
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On the cusp of publishing his second book in a year, Adam Ross talks with Chapter 16 about women, men, and life since Mr. Peanut
June 9, 2011 Last June, Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, inspired critical assessments like “ingenious,” “brilliant,” “riveting,” “audacious,” “arresting,” “forceful,” “involving,” “stirring,” “original,” “harrowing,” “bleakly convincing,” “unflinching,” and “mesmerizing.” A year later, the Nashville author is back with Ladies and Gentlemen, a new collection of short stories. Due on shelves June 28, it considers many of the same questions raised in Mr. Peanut: the human temptation to cruelty, the simultaneously redemptive and damning nature of passion, the difficulty in forging an integrated and identifiable self from disparate and sometimes self-contradictory impulses and desires. Today Ross offers Chapter 16 readers a sneak peak at the collection and answers questions about the book.
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With the opening pages of “Middlemen,” Adam Ross gives Chapter 16 readers an early look at his forthcoming story collection
June 9, 2011 In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen- year- olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.
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