Q & A | Chapter 16

Savage Lunacy, Comical Rage

By Ed Tarkington

January 5, 2012

January 5, 2012 In 2009, Wells Tower exploded onto the American literary landscape with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, one of the most widely acclaimed debut short-story collections in recent memory. With quirky characters ranging from downtrodden real-estate speculators and Gulf Coast aquarium enthusiasts to lovelorn carnival hands and pillaging medieval Vikings, Everything Ravaged dazzles with the delightful oddity of its settings and especially with Tower’s relentlessly inventive prose. His most recent work includes a series of scathingly satirical short-short stories written for a new coffee-table book of paintings by John Currin. Wells Tower will read from his work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 12, 2012.

No Sophomore Slump

By Fernanda Moore

November 30, 2011

November 30, 2011 Published in twenty-nine countries to rave reviews around the world, Between Shades of Gray, the bestselling debut novel by Ruta Sepetys, is a writer’s wildest dream come true. Now the Nashville author has signed a six-figure book deal and become the first American to win the prestigious Prix RTL-Lire, a French prize for the best novel for young people published in the last year. Fresh from the gala at the Petit Palais in Paris, Sepetys answered questions from Chapter 16 about her literary influences, the connections she’s forged with the descendants of Baltic refugees or deportees, and the much-discussed “darkness” of literature pitched to an adolescent audience.

Social Justice, Good Ol’ Girl Style

By Margaret Renkl

November 22, 2011

November 22, 2011 On December 1, Matraca Berg, Marshall Chapman, Jill McCorkle, and Lee Smith will present “An Evening of Story and Song”—a more intimate, more improvisational version of their off-Broadway show, Good Ol’ Girls—to Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre. The show is a benefit for The Center for Contemplative Justice at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel at Vanderbilt University, the newest initiative of St. Augustine’s chaplain, Becca Stevens. Last month Stevens was named a “Champion for Change” by the White House for her work with Magdalene and Thistle Farms. Chapter 16 recently interviewed all four Good Ol’ Girls creators about their unique collaboration—and their support for Stevens:

The Woods Are Lovely

By Joe Nolan

November 17, 2011

November 17, 2011 Southern Appalachian Celebration is not just a big book filled with pretty pictures. It’s also laced with big ideas that call for bold actions, a book that poses important questions, literally asking its readers to put themselves in the forest’s place when we consider our role as its custodian. Despite such sentiments, the book never feels like a hippie tree hug. The combination of Chris Bolgiano’s sober, clear text and James Valentine’s resonant images gives the book a Zen-like stateliness that affirms the seriousness of its intentions without insisting on its own seriousness.

A License to Lie

By Charlotte Pence

November 11, 2011

November 11, 2011 Internationally acclaimed journalist, poet, and playwright Antjie Krog was born into a family of Afrikaner writers and grew up on a farm within a conservative Afrikaans-speaking community. She published her first book at age seventeen and since then has continued to write groundbreaking work about South African injustices. On November 15 and 16, she will give a lecture and a poetry reading in Memphis at Rhodes College. Both events are free and open to the public.

That Great American Style Icon, the King James Bible

By Beth Waltemath

November 7, 2011

November 3, 2011 In Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, Robert Alter explores the various ways the King James Version and its assimilation into American speech have shaped the literary styles of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson. Prior to his appearances on November 10 at the University of Memphis and November 11 at the 1611 Symposium at Rhodes College in Memphis, Alter answered questions from Chapter 16 about the way “a set of texts rendered in English four hundred years ago can still fire the imagination of writers who differ extremely from each other and from the Bible.”

That Great American Style Icon, the King James Bible

“A searing sci-fi thriller about a woman reckoning with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in the face of a coming apocalypse — from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.”

~ the publisher