News & Notes | Chapter 16

(Not) Between the Sheets

On book tour for Between Shades of Gray, YA novelist Ruta Sepetys is attracting some bewildered guests

By Margaret Renkl | May 17, 2012

May 17, 2012 Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on whether you’re referring to literary artistry or raw book sales—Between Shades of Gray by Nashville novelist Ruta Sepetys is frequently being confused with a novel by a similar name: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both authors are on book tour this spring. Sepety’s book is a YA novel about a young girl’s incarceration in Stalin’s death camps. James’s is about… something else.

"Colorful, Uncensored, and Opinionated"

A former Moss Workshp student talks with Richard Bausch

By Margaret Renkl | May 14, 2012

May 14, 2012 In 2005, when Richard Bausch accepted a job in the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis, it was on one condition: the department must agree that part of his responsibilities would include the opportunity to teach, free of charge, a group of aspiring writers in the Memphis community.

Double-Dealing

YA novelist Victoria Schwab has two more books on the way—and one of them is for grownups

By Margaret Renkl | May 7, 2012

May 7, 2012 Nashville YA author Victoria Schwab is a 24-year-old wunderkind who wrote her first novel, The Near Witch, while she was still in college and signed with an agent before she was old enough to buy beer. Even before the book was released last year, Schwab had become a leader in the literary community, rallying writers (and agents and editors) across the country to help in a unique fundraising effort to benefit the victims of Tennessee’s 2010 floods. When The Near Witch finally appeared last August, it was to great acclaim: Chapter 16‘s Susannah Felts called it “an accomplished take on the [fairy-tale] form, artfully deploying many of its traditional elements: a seemingly distant time and place, a dark forest, children, a young person on a quest, and, of course, witches.”

First-Person Point of View

Amy Greene and Ann Patchett may be novelists, but they have opinions, too

By Margaret Renkl | May 4, 2012

May 4, 2012 Tennessee’s legislative agenda this year has earned the state unwelcome notice in a national media that too often seems downright eager for any chance to portray Southerners as stupid, lazy, and mean. Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have had particular fun this legislative season with new Tennessee laws governing what may or may not be taught—or even said—by the state’s schoolteachers. So it was an especially welcome surprise to open last Sunday’s edition of The New York Time and find a smart, reasoned, historically nuanced response to the current political climate by an actual Tennessean: novelist Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot.

Charlotte, Sixty Years Later

In an essay for The New York Times Book Review, Michael Sims describes the barn where Charlotte hung her web

By Margaret Renkl | April 23, 2012

April 23, 2012 Michael Sims is a curious—but not a nosy—biographer, as Chapter 16‘s Serenity Gerbman pointed out in her review of Sims’s bestselling 2011 book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: “White was famously reclusive and—strange as it may seem for a biographer—Sims understands and respects that need for privacy. Allowing White’s words and experiences to speak for themselves, he offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the life and mind that created Charlotte’s Web, but of the creative process that led to the book and of the sheer work it entailed. The Story of Charlotte’s Web is quite literally that: a biography of the book itself. How did it come to be? What forces and experiences throughout White’s life shaped him and converged to bring his timeless classic into being?”

Ann Patchett Is On Another Roll

Ann Pachett lands on the Orange Prize shortlist, publishes an op-ed piece in The New York Times, makes Time magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world, and appears on the PBS NewsHour—and that’s just this week

By Margaret Renkl | April 19, 2012

April 19, 2012 Since last May, when she published a bestselling novel (State of Wonder) and simultaneously announced that she and Karen Hayes were opening a bookstore in Nashville (Parnassus Books, now the most famous independent bookstore in the country), Ann Patchett has been having what she calls “a media-heavy moment.” In fact it’s been a media-heavy year, and the spotlight shows no sign of dimming. Patchett has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, written an op-ed piece for The New York Times, made Time magazine’s list of the hundred most influential people in the world, and appeared on the PBS NewsHour—all in less than thirty-six hours.

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning