The Comedy of Empathy
From the Chapter 16 archive: “Doubt is essential to the writing life,” Andrew Sean Greer says. “If you only had arrogance, you’d write a book that’s all ego.”
Beyond Catharsis
In Stray, Stephanie Danler doesn’t just look directly at her own childhood trauma, but tracks the borders and shapes that trauma forms in her adult life. Danler will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 4.
Learning to Speak Silence
In A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Pico Iyer explores what it means to pay attention to a culture you can’t hope to fully understand. Iyer will appear at the 2019 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville on October 11-13.
Shaping, Shaped
“I love that shock of recognition when what we think of as normal and mundane shifts or cracks open,” fiction writer Adrianne Harun says. Harun is on the faculty of the Sewanee School of Letters.
A Greener Frequency
In ancient myths, people change into trees. The Overstory, the latest novel by new-to-Tennessee Richard Powers, examines the myth-like power trees still have to change people into something more selfless and more attentive.
The Sound of the Sentence
Amy Hempel’s fiction offers up an almost musical experience, one where rhythm and pulse seem to affect the reader in tandem with the goings-on of the story itself. Hempel will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on April 19.
