Q & A

Angela Sutton’s Pirates of the Slave Trade weaves together biographies of fascinating figures, tales of maritime warfare, and analyses of politics and power in Europe and West Africa — with implications for the system of slavery that shaped the United States.

In Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, Danielle Chapman grapples with the meaning of her Middle Tennessee ancestry and military forbears, including a Confederate second-great grandfather. Chapman will appear at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis on March 17, Rhodes College on March 18, and Middle Tennessee State University on March 19.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: A National Book Award Finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, The Yellow Birds by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers has been hailed by a host of literary luminaries as an instant classic. Written in lyrical prose that veers between terse understatement and vivid figurative language, The Yellow Birds is a rich literary experience as well as a harrowing narrative about the effects of war on both soldiers and families. 

Nashville native V.E. Schwab talks with Chapter 16 about The Fragile Threads of Power, the first novel in a new trilogy that returns readers to the Four Londons of her Shades of Magic series.

In We Become What We Normalize, David Dark considers the societal cost of going along to get along. Dark will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 10, Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on November 12, and Novel in Memphis on November 19.

This year marks the publication of three books by Dan O’Brien: Survivor’s Notebook, his fifth poetry collection; From Scarsdale, a childhood memoir mining familial trauma; and True Story, a trilogy of documentary plays.