Can’t Stop the Signal
May 21, 2013 Spin through your AM dial past the static, past the end-timer rants and the political talk, and eventually you’ll tune into 650AM, the home of WSM Radio. You are listening to a signal that’s been going strong for the better part of a century, a signal that helped create Nashville’s very identity and broadcasts the culture of country music to the entire world. In Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, Craig Havighurst follows an extraordinary group of artists, engineers, and managers as they created a broadcasting legend—and with it an entire industry—from the ground up. Havighurst will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 23, 2013, at 6:30 p.m.
May 14, 2013 Twenty-five years ago and long B.G. (before Google), illustrator and writer David Macaulay published his groundbreaking book, The Way Things Work, now a classic of educational children’s literature. In 2008, he published a follow-up of sorts, The Way We Work, which applied his innovative and meticulous show-and-tell approach to the human body. Truly an artist for all ages, Macaulay has received both the Caldecott Medal and a MacArthur genius grant. On May 18 at 2 p.m., he’ll deliver the commencement address to the 2013 graduating class of Watkins College of Art, Design & Film in Nashville. The event, which will be held at the 
May 1, 2013 Beautiful Ruins is a showcase for Jess Walter’s outrageous literary gifts in virtually every genre and style, so it’s no surprise that critics have been outdoing each other with superlatives like “a literary miracle” (NPR), a “high-wire feat of bravura storytelling” (The New York Times Book Review), and “a brilliant, madcap meditation on fate” (Kirkus Reviews). “Why mince words?” wrote Richard Russo: “Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” Walter recently spoke with Chapter 16 prior to his forthcoming event at 
