Features | Chapter 16

"It's a Gift I Want to Give the City I Love"

Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes talk with Chapter 16 about their new bookstore—Parnassus Books

By Margaret Renkl | June 13, 2011

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.

Round Two

On the cusp of publishing his second book in a year, Adam Ross talks with Chapter 16 about women, men, and life since Mr. Peanut

By Margaret Renkl | June 9, 2011

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.

Book Excerpt: Adam Ross's Ladies and Gentlemen

With the opening pages of “Middlemen,” Adam Ross gives Chapter 16 readers an early look at his forthcoming story collection

By Adam Ross | June 9, 2011

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.

Garden Secrets

On the sesquicentennial of The Secret Garden, Michael Sims considers the surprising connections between his own Crossville boyhood and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s masterpiece

By Michael Sims | June 6, 2011

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.

An Opry Home Companion

With A Guitar and a Pen Old Time Radio Hour, novelist Robert Hicks has created a live broadcast that just might save the printed word

By Sarah Norris | May 25, 2011

May 25, 2011 When Garrison Keillor got the idea for his long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, he was sitting in the Confederate Gallery of the Ryman Auditorium, watching the Opry. Now novelist Robert Hicks has created his own home-grown radio variety show, A Guitar and a Pen Old Time Radio Hour, a combination of the Opry and A Prairie Home Companion, with a dash of Thacker Mountain Radio thrown in. Chapter 16 checked in on last week’s show, which featured readings by novelist William Gay and musical performances by Holly Williams, daughter of Hank Jr. Another edition of “A Guitar and a Pen Old Time Radio Hour” will be taped at Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant in Franklin on May 26 and will feature Eric Brace, Peter Cooper, Fayssoux Starling McLean, and Rodney Crowell. The show starts at 6 p.m. Cost is $15, and seating is limited. To make reservations, call 615-794-5527.

Against the One True Story

Ann Patchett talks with Chapter 16 about her new novel and about why “we can all stand a little less reality”

By Margaret Renkl | April 25, 2011

April 25, 2011 Ann Patchett’s forthcoming novel, State of Wonder, features cannibals and snakes and a Heart of Darkness-like odyssey into an unknown world that leads inexorably to a confrontation with the protagonist’s past. It is thus unlike any other novel Patchett has ever written, and yet it has all the hallmarks of a Patchett novel, nonetheless: written in lucid, almost transparent prose, the new novel offers a page-turning tale about a set of characters who are intensely original and particular, but who are at the same time so recognizable as to be nearly universal. State of Wonder will be released on June 7, and Patchett will read from it on June 28 at the Nashville Public Library as part of the Salon@615 series. Today, Patchett talks candidly about the book and offers an exclusive excerpt for Chapter 16 readers.

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