Essays | Chapter 16

A Modern-Day Sage

Something in those dark, focused eyes made you think he possessed answers to questions that weren’t meant to have answers

By Derrick Hill | February 29, 2012

I had the opportunity just over a year ago to interview William Gay for the Tennessee Literary Project. Near the end of the conversation, William said, “Writing should feel like it’s about something bigger than it is.” I have mulled over these words time and again. With William, it wasn’t only the work but the writer himself who seemed to be about something “bigger.”

Behind Those Glorious Books

Suzanne Kingsbury inventories a few little-known facts about William Gay

By Suzanne Kingsbury | February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012 I met William Gay during a reading of The Long Home in 2000, and we became very close friends. As a literary demi-god, he often seemed not quite of this world, and yet the complexity and genius of his work matched equally who he was as a man. Because he was quiet and often introverted, I wrote a list of little-known (and a few widely-known) facts I learned about him to share with those who would like to have known the man behind those glorious books.

No Pretense

With William Gay, there was a real sense that he had survived this life by the skin of his teeth

By Robert Hicks | February 29, 2012

February 29, 2012 It all began with a Christmas gift of Provinces of Night from my neighbors, Diana and Gary Fisketjon. I’m not sure which of them told me it was an important book, but coming from either of them it was high praise. Whatever I was already reading that Christmas, I soon put it aside as I began to lose myself in William Gay’s powerful novel.

A Valentine to Books

For Tina LoTufo, a trip to the bookshelf is a way of rereading her own love story

By Tina LoTufo | February 14, 2012

February 14, 2012 I am the lone reader in a house full of philistines. My youngest child will still pick up the occasional book, but at sixteen she has so many other interests that each year reading seems to fall lower down her list of priorities. Not me. I don’t have a list of priorities. There is only reading.

Letterpressed

How a Chapter 16 writer’s great-grandmother befriended—and betrayed—J.D. Salinger

By Sarah Norris | December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011 Who owns the story of a friendship? A Chapter 16 writer considers her great-grandmother’s decision to sell the letters J.D. Salinger had written during their twenty years of friendship—and the great, reclusive writer’s final letter in response.

On Happiness and the Thematic Resonance of Pigeon Racing

On this Indonesian slum tour, an American novelist discovers more than he expected

By Adam Prince | December 1, 2011

December 1, 2011 The pigeon races are going to be a scene in the novel I’ve come to Jakarta to research. Thematic resonance is what I’ve told Ronny. It took me half an hour to explain. His English isn’t perfect, but I don’t think that was really the problem. It was more that he just didn’t see the point.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher