Q & A | Chapter 16

To Justify the Ways of God to Man, 21st-Century Style

William Paul Young discusses the phenomenal success of his bestseller, The Shack

By Margaret Renkl | November 11, 2009

In 2005, William Paul Young was living in a tiny rented house with his wife and six children and working as a “general manager, janitor and inside sales guy” for a friend’s small business. Then he wrote a novel about a man who falls into despair after his young daughter disappears, only to meet God himself—or herself, actually—in the shack where the child was murdered. Life for Young has not been the same. The Shack is now a mega-bestseller, with over 10 million copies in print. On The New York Times list for seventy-six consecutive weeks—forty-nine of them in the number-one slot—the book has been translated into thirty-four languages, selling more than a million copies in Brazil alone. In advance of his Nashville appearance on November 14, Young recently answered a few questions from Chapter 16 about his book.

Out of Carolina—But Always Of It

Once a working-class kid, always a working-class kid, according to novelist Dorothy Allison—which explains why she works so hard to make each word absolutely right

By Adam Prince | November 5, 2009

Dorothy Allison is an unrelenting realist, steeped in the working-class South. She began her career with the short-story collection Trash (1988), published by the feminist and lesbian press Firebrand Books. Her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina (1992), was a finalist for the National Book Award and continues to be widely read and championed today. Since then she has written a book of essays, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature (1994); a meditation on storytelling, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995); and a second novel, Cavedweller (1998). Each has continued to attract critical success and a large cadre of fans who appreciate her craft and her willingness to write about characters on the margins.

The Prize in the Cereal Box

A Nashville nanny enters a Cheerios contest … and wins a publishing contract

By Margaret Renkl | October 19, 2009

Nashville nanny Shellie Braeuner didn’t learn about the first Cheerios Spoonfuls of Stories Children’s Book Contest until the final day to enter. Undaunted, she came up with a charming rhyme about bathing the family dog and entered the contest online, barely in time to pick up the older children from school. Despite a typo in the title, The Great Dog Wash beat out a thousand other entries to win the grand prize—five thousand dollars and the chance at a hardcover publishing contract.

Alive and Well—in Sewanee and Elsewhere

Wyatt Prunty explains why reports of poetry’s death have been greatly exaggerated

By Diann Blakely | October 2, 2009

“I am able to report that poetry is alive and well today, and that it is highly varied in technique and subject,” observes Wyatt Prunty. “I enjoy the proof of that every July here in Sewanee.”

The Call to Serve: The Life of an American President, George Herbert Walker Bush: A Visual Biography

Jon Meacham
Random House
384
$45

“Lavishly illustrated, ‘The Call to Serve’ is an intimate, illuminating portrait of the forty-first president, a man who was so much more than just his politics. In words and images—many found in a lifetime of scrapbooks kept by Barbara Pierce Bush—Jon Meacham brings George H. W. Bush vividly to life.”

~the publisher