Chapter 16

Cutting Remembrances

Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds, discusses the delicate art of writing about war

By Ed Tarkington | November 10, 2023

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: A National Book Award Finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, The Yellow Birds by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers has been hailed by a host of literary luminaries as an instant classic. Written in lyrical prose that veers between terse understatement and vivid figurative language, The Yellow Birds is a rich literary experience as well as a harrowing narrative about the effects of war on both soldiers and families.

Blood and Gold

Power, desire, and survival collide in Ben Fountain’s Devil Makes Three

By Ed Tarkington | September 21, 2023

Ben Fountain’s Devil Makes Three is a pulse-quickening adventure and espionage thriller set against the political turmoil of early 1990s Haiti. Fountain will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.

On This Hill

A neighborhood unites to protect a child in James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

By Ed Tarkington | August 8, 2023

James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a powerful tale of early 20th-century Jewish and African American communities bonding together to protect a disabled orphan. McBride will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 11.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Frank Bascombe returns for a final road trip in Richard Ford’s Be Mine

By Ed Tarkington | June 20, 2023

Richard Ford’s latest Frank Bascombe novel, Be Mine, marks Frank’s fifth and purportedly final curtain call as whimsical Everyman, shrewdly dissecting the shifting landscape of American life and his uncertain place in it.

Nothing More Autobiographical

Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done is a window into a lively mind

By Ed Tarkington | April 28, 2023

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it,” writes Lorrie Moore in her collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary.

Of Blood and Darkness

Cormac McCarthy returns with The Passenger and Stella Maris

By Ed Tarkington | October 25, 2022

A cult hero for the first half of his career, Cormac McCarthy is now a literary institution. As he approaches 90, he delivers two companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which fuse dizzying intellectual exploration with his trademark gift for depicting outsiders drawn unwillingly into gripping intrigues with lethal consequences.

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