Chapter 16

Brushing the Divine

For novelist Amy Greene, a haunted town hidden on the Cumberland Plateau is the perfect place to write

By Amy Greene | October 28, 2022

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.

At the Top of His Game

With End of Watch, Stephen King combines detective fiction and the supernatural suspense of his early career

By Amy Greene | June 6, 2016

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.

Home Country

Novelist Amy Greene reflects on James Agee’s effort in A Death in the Family to tell something true in fiction

By Amy Greene | May 27, 2016

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.

Forsaking All Others

With Hide, Matthew Griffin has written a love story for the ages

By Amy Greene | March 23, 2016

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.

A Southern Coming-of-Age Tale With Its Own Singular Sound

Ed Tarkington’s debut novel is an ode to love in all its complicated forms

By Amy Greene | January 5, 2016

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.

Anguish and Anticipation

Bestselling novelist Amy Greene describes the torture of waiting for a book to be published

By Amy Greene | March 28, 2011

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.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly