News & Notes | Chapter 16

A Lin-erick

The New York Times invites Roy Blount Jr. to celebrate the New York Knicks’s Jeremy Lin

By Margaret Renkl | February 20, 2012

February 20, 2012 The sudden fame of point guard Jeremy Lin, who emerged from obscurity this month to lead the New York Knicks in a winning streak, has been dubbed “Linsanity” by punsters in the sports media. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that someone would be inspired to write a “lin-erick,” or to commission one, and if a limerick is called for, the media naturally turn to Roy Blount Jr., a Vanderbilt University graduate whose facility for word play is unmatched among contemporary writers.

First-Person Superlative

Chapter 16 takes a tour through the rave reviews for John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead

By Margaret Renkl | February 16, 2012

February 16, 2012 update John Jeremiah Sullivan, a Sewanee grad, has somehow created for himself what can only be called the best writing job in the whole world. Magazines like GQ and Harper’s and The Paris Review and the Oxford American send him out to report on all manner of subjects high and low: cave paintings on the Cumberland Plateau, the grotesque celebrity afterlife of Real World stars, Christian-rock concerts, the waning days of the last living Fugitive, scientific opinion about the future of the human race. Sullivan does more than merely report on what he finds, and does more than merely tell the story in an outrageously original way that involves a page-to-out-loud-laughter ratio of something like 1:1. He also manages the kind of alchemy that all great writing ultimately achieves: John Jeremiah Sullivan transforms every subject he writes about into himself, and himself into the subject, and somehow the reader, too, gets transformed along the way.

A Bhutanese Love Story

In an essay for The Guardian, Linda Leaming tells her own story

By Margaret Renkl | February 14, 2012

February 14, 2012 When Linda Leaming went to Bhutan for the first time in 1994, she fell in love with the land and the people. And reader, she married one of them. The Nashville-based author of Married to Bhutan tells their story in the Guardian, here.

Dr. Verghese, Hollywood is Calling

Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone is headed to the big screen

By Margaret Renkl | February 9, 2012

February 9, 2012 Abraham Verghese’s sprawling epic, Cutting for Stone, just passed the two-year mark on The New York Times bestseller list (that’s 104 weeks, if you’re counting), has sold more than a million copies, and has been published in twenty-five different languages.

Another Prize for Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa has won Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for literature in translationeld by The Society of Authors

By Margaret Renkl | February 8, 2012

February 8, 2012 The Society of Authors has awarded Khaled Mattawa the £3,000 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize at a London event to celebrate literature in translation. The prizewinning collection is Selected Poems by Syrian poet Adonis. Poetry doesn’t often yield riches of the monetary kind, but Mattawa is on something of a roll where lucrative literary prizes are concerned.

An Early Look at a 9-11 Novel Set in Tennessee

Narrative publishes a long excerpt from Richard Bausch’s next novel

By Margaret Renkl | February 3, 2012

February 3, 2012 Richard Bausch’s last novel, Peace was a war story set in Northern Italy during World War II. A spare, gorgeous book hardly longer than a novella, the book was profoundly praised all over the literary world and won for Bausch the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The Memphis writer’s forthcoming novel opens on September 11, 2001, and promises to be another examination of the human cost of war:

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