June 29, 2011 The Ford family of Memphis may be known as a political dynasty, but Victoria Ford is in the news for a much less controversial reason: last month she won a national Scholastic Art and Writing Award—and a $10,000 college scholarship. Past winners of the prestigious prize include Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, and Truman Capote. For Ford, the awards ceremony, held May 31 in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, was a moment to remember.
June 24, 2011 Downtown Knoxville finally has something that Knoxville readers have dreamed of for a long time: a really good independent bookstore. Union Ave. Books fills very nicely the void left by Carpe Librum Booksellers, Knoxville’s only indie, which folded last year. Flossie McNabb, one of Carpe’s former owners, has partnered with attorney Melinda Meador to launch the store, which had its grand opening last weekend. As Knoxville Metro Pulse editor Jack Neely told Chapter 16, “Any city that calls itself a city needs an independent bookstore. It makes for a different destination than just bars, restaurants, and clothing stores. It’s the type of business that drives curiosity.”
June 13, 2011 Last Wednesday, novelist Ann Patchett appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to discuss her new novel, State of Wonder. It was in many ways a routine discussion about a much-anticipated book by the bestselling author of Bel Canto and Truth & Beauty (among many others), but nearly an hour into the conversation, Patchett casually dropped a bombshell: she and a business partner, former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes, were about to open a new bookstore in Nashville, a city that has been without one for the last six months. “I don’t know if I’m opening an ice shop in the age of Frigidaire,” Patchett said, “but I can’t live in a city that doesn’t have a bookstore.” Chapter 16 caught up with both Hayes and Patchett and talked with them by phone about their plans for Parnassus Books and about the story behind the store.
June 9, 2011 Last June, Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, inspired critical assessments like “ingenious,” “brilliant,” “riveting,” “audacious,” “arresting,” “forceful,” “involving,” “stirring,” “original,” “harrowing,” “bleakly convincing,” “unflinching,” and “mesmerizing.” A year later, the Nashville author is back with Ladies and Gentlemen, a new collection of short stories. Due on shelves June 28, it considers many of the same questions raised in Mr. Peanut: the human temptation to cruelty, the simultaneously redemptive and damning nature of passion, the difficulty in forging an integrated and identifiable self from disparate and sometimes self-contradictory impulses and desires. Today Ross offers Chapter 16 readers a sneak peak at the collection and answers questions about the book.
June 9, 2011 In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen- year- olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.
June 6, 2011 It was the wheelchair scene that got me. I had been identifying more than I realized with the adventures of sad little Mary, who lost her parents to a cholera outbreak in India and who finds herself reluctantly lodged at a relative’s country estate in chilly England. Her only companions are the privileged brat Colin, who turns out not to be crippled, and homespun Dickon, who almost speaks the language of his wild-animal pets. In retrospect I find it easy to see that each child spoke to a different aspect of my own childhood experience and yearnings. But I didn’t think of that at the time. When Colin rose from the wheelchair, healed by the other children’s innocent affection and his own determination—in short, cured by the secret walled garden where it was safe to be a child—I was astonished to find myself crying.
