“It Changes Everything, and It Changes Nothing”
July 30, 2015 Today Chapter 16 contributing writer Ed Tarkington talks about his forthcoming novel, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which he calls a “mash-up of Cain and Abel, the Prodigal Son, The Graduate, and ‘A Rose for Emily,’ set in the small-town Upper South, with a soundtrack by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.” Tarkington will read from the novel at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015. All festival events are free and open to the public.
July 21, 2015 Alysia Burton Steele’s Delta Jewels is quite obviously part autobiography, part biography, part photography book, and part autograph book. But it is the less obvious parts—Steele’s critique of prevailing beauty aesthetics and her exploration of the intimate lives of long-lived black women—that dazzle. She will discuss the book at the 
July 16, 2015 The Redeemers is Ace Atkin’s fifth novel in a suspense series featuring Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson, a truly Southern action hero who seems destined to build a following similar to John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers or C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett. Atkins will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on July 26, 2015, at 4 p.m.
July 14, 2015 Jimmy Carter was fifty-two years old when he was elected president of the United States in 1976. His time in the White House was, as he puts it, “the pinnacle of my political life,” but they were only four years in a life built of service—to his family, to his faith, to his country, and to the world—that has now spanned more than nine decades. Today Carter talks with Chapter 16 about his new memoir, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. He will sign copies of the book at the Nashville Public Library on July 23, 2015, at 4:30 p.m.
June 30, 2015 As a critic and editor, Nicki Pendleton Wood has been writing about food for decades. Now she’s brought forth her own cookbook: Southern Cooking for Company is a compendium of Southern recipes collected from home cooks all over the region. Wood will discuss the project at two Nashville events: Parnassus Books on July 2, 2015, at 6:30 p.m., and Barnes & Noble Vanderbilt on July 9 at 7 p.m.
June 18, 2015 While most contemporary writers of post-apocalyptic fiction trace their literary lineage to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Emily St. John Mandel reached back to Shakespeare’s King Lear in writing her own bestselling novel, Station Eleven. Mandel will read from the novel’s paperback release at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 24, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.
