Mona Problim and her siblings are off to new adventures in Island in the Stars, the third and final installment in Natalie Lloyd’s Problim Children fantasy series. Lloyd talks with Chapter 16 about saying goodbye to beloved characters, writing from the heart, and being “a queen in Narnia.”
Set in Detroit, Angela Flournoy’s critically celebrated first novel follows the struggles—with relationships, addiction, finances, even a ghost—of thirteen siblings and their parents. Flournoy discussed The Turner House with Chapter 16 prior to her 2016 appearances at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville and the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.
Mohsin Hamid’s work conveys a deep moral questioning and a valiant effort to make sense of a world turned upside down. In this 2018 interview, Hamid answers questions from Chapter 16 about his literary influences and his fourth novel, Exit West.
Prior to her 2015 lecture at Rhodes College, historian Nell Irvin Painter talked with Chapter 16 about how the concept of race entered human consciousness, why notions of beauty are so inextricably linked to sex, and how contemporary readers should accommodate for historical wrong-headedness.
In an interview conducted prior to her visit to the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, The Honorable Sonia Sotomayor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, discussed her books for young readers, Turning Pages: My Life Story and The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor.
In this 2013 interview, artist and author Gene Luen Yang discusses the evolution of the graphic novel. Yang’s own autobiographical book, American Born Chinese, was the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award and the first to win the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young-adult literature.
