FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The Celts believed heaven and earth are three feet apart but even shorter in these thin places. Are such locations where we’re able to brush up against the divine? Sometimes writing feels to me like a brush with the divine. Maybe that’s why places like Rugby call out to those of us who write, putting stories into our heads and almost demanding that we set them down on paper.
June 6, 2016 With End of Watch, Stephen King combines detective fiction and the supernatural suspense of his early career to great effect in the forms of mind control, body-swapping, and telekinesis, a la Carrie and Firestarter. King will discuss End of Watch at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on June 11, 2016, at 8 p.m.
May 27, 2016 In the third of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, novelist Amy Greene reflects on the lasting legacy of James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958, three years after Agee’s own death.
March 23, 2016 Matthew Griffin’s debut novel comes to us at a pivot point in our national history. But Hide can’t be reduced to a social-justice tale, or one of love between gay men. It’s a story about the kind of love, gay or straight, that endures beyond youth, strength, and memory. Griffin will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on March 30, 2016, at 6 p.m.
January 5, 2016 In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, longtime Chapter 16 contributor Ed Tarkington hits many of the classic coming-of-age tale’s familiar notes, but the cast of characters and the rural Virginia town he populates in his accomplished debut are nothing less than singular. Tarkington will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 5, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.
March 28, 2011 Waiting for my first novel to be released was a little bit like torture, and I could almost believe that getting a book deal had been a dream. In the three years between the day my agent sold the book and the day it was officially published, there were two rounds of edits, followed by copyediting, then proofreading, and, finally, months of behind-the-scenes production and marketing that had nothing to do with me. After years of blood, sweat, and tears, my novel was out of my hands. Bloodroot would have a life of its own, and all I could do was watch.
