Editor's Note
We’ve got reviews of two titles by Southern Festival of Books authors this week, each focused on a gifted woman — one fictional, one real. We also take a look at a hefty new biography of a Tennessee literary heavyweight. (If you’re prepping for the festival, be sure to check out all Chapter 16’s festival coverage here.)
Livia, the protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita, is “a character who embodies music,” writes reviewer Sean Kinch. “For her, playing the piano is not simply a cherished activity, but a mode of being.” The novel’s depiction of a talented woman struggling to make peace with her romantic past reveals that “relationships cannot be separated from the times when we encounter them. Mr. Right, it’s safe to say, is necessarily Mr. Right Now.”
Holding Lightning, Emily Lordi’s biography of pop icon Whitney Houston, seeks to reclaim the singer and her extraordinary talent from the public’s fascination with her troubled life and early death. Reviewer Sarah Norris writes, “Lordi restores the scale of the woman behind the myth: ambitious, magnanimous, funny, complicated, loving, difficult, sometimes self-destructive, often fiercely self-aware, a woman who valued faith and family, vices and autonomy. She honors Houston’s contagious light and spirit without pretending that light was cost-free.”
It’s been three years since Cormac McCarthy died at age 89, and biographer Tracy Daugherty has delivered a comprehensive portrait of the artist and the man in Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited. Reviewer David Wesley Williams writes, “Daugherty’s biography gives us everything, a life in full. A strayed son. An otherwise-engaged husband and father. A carouser. A charmer, too, when he wanted to be. A good friend, but one who tended to set the terms. A deep and curious soul. And, yes, a writer of staggering creativity — Southern novels that can sit on a shelf with Faulkner, Western works that stand alone.”
News Roundup
- Submissions for the Eastover Prize for Debut Story Collection are open through December 31.
- Poet and artist Henry L. Jones discussed his work on the Revisit Your Dreams podcast.
- Annette Sisson’s Rhizomes and Bones won the 2026 CPR Editor’s Prize.
- Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
- An excerpt from Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
