When the Looking Changes
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing.
Book Reviews
Making Believe
“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.
A Different Appalachian Upbringing
In Another Appalachia, Neema Avashia explores what it is like to grow up both gay and the daughter of immigrants, making sense of life as both insider and outsider.
A Fight Over the Mountain Commons
In the 19th century, large numbers of Appalachians supported themselves by harvesting herbs, roots, and other botanicals that grew wild in the mountain woodlands. These “sang diggers,” as they were colloquially known, and the story of their importance in the medicinal botanical trade are the focus of Luke Manget’s Ginseng Diggers.
Re-election
The ambitious heroine of Election returns in Tom Perrotta’s latest novel, Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Perrotta will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 16.
Save Yourself
In Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection of fiction, How Strange a Season, tough women who are fed up with compromise and betrayal decide to scrap their lives and start anew, elsewhere.
