Nonfiction | Chapter 16

Europe’s Bloody Borderlands

Timothy Snyder talks with Chapter 16 about the peoples and territories trapped between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during the 1930s and 1940s

By Tim Boyd | January 27, 2023

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In the bestselling Bloodlands, which has been critically acclaimed and widely translated, Timothy Snyder argues that the systematic killings in the Nazi death camps were part of the same arc of violence as the mass starving inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1930s and the extra-legal killings perpetrated by Germans and Russians alike during their occupation of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States.

The City Of Light and Love

Edmund White talks with Chapter 16 about his dishy, sexy new memoir of life in Paris

By Liz Garrigan | July 7, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “I hate writing,” Edmund White told a newspaper last year, but he has nevertheless been turning out celebrated titles since the 1970s, writing novels and nonfiction to wide acclaim and drawing on his life as a gay man for all but a handful of them. White moved from New York to Paris in 1983 and stayed in the City of Light for fifteen years, an experience he details in his latest book, Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris.

You Are What You Cook

Michael Pollan talks with Chapter 16 about his groundbreaking new book, Cooked

By Paul V. Griffith | July 1, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan apprentices himself to four culinary experts: a barbeque pit-master, a brazier, a baker, and a fermenter. By mastering their techniques, he writes, we can wrest the kitchen away from Big Food and reclaim both our food chain and our selves.

When the Looking Changes

Critic and author Teju Cole thinks about photography and politics

By Aram Goudsouzian | June 17, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing.

Deconstructing a Dog

Bronwen Dickey talks with Chapter 16 about Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

By Maria Browning | May 27, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Whether you’re the adoring owner of a pittie or a person who thinks pit-bull bans make perfect sense, you are likely to find some of your assumptions overturned by Bronwen Dickey’s Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. Dickey sifts through a great deal of history, science, and popular culture to uncover the truth about the dogs and the source of our extreme ideas about them.

The Worthless Servant

Novelist Ann Patchett takes a ride with Charlie Strobel, Nashville advocate for the homeless

By Ann Patchett | May 20, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Nashville’s Room in the Inn serves individuals experiencing homelessness by providing a winter shelter program, recuperative care, education and workforce development, and solutions for permanent housing. In the summer of 2012, novelist Ann Patchett made the rounds with Room in the Inn’s founder, Father Charles Strobel, and wrote an essay about the experience, which appears in Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience, From Joan of Arc to Oscar Romero, edited by Catherine Wolff.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses