May 17, 2012 Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on whether you’re referring to literary artistry or raw book sales—Between Shades of Gray by Nashville novelist Ruta Sepetys is frequently being confused with a novel by a similar name: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both authors are on book tour this spring. Sepety’s book is a YA novel about a young girl’s incarceration in Stalin’s death camps. James’s is about… something else.
May 14, 2012 In 2005, when Richard Bausch accepted a job in the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis, it was on one condition: the department must agree that part of his responsibilities would include the opportunity to teach, free of charge, a group of aspiring writers in the Memphis community.
May 7, 2012 Nashville YA author Victoria Schwab is a 24-year-old wunderkind who wrote her first novel, The Near Witch, while she was still in college and signed with an agent before she was old enough to buy beer. Even before the book was released last year, Schwab had become a leader in the literary community, rallying writers (and agents and editors) across the country to help in a unique fundraising effort to benefit the victims of Tennessee’s 2010 floods. When The Near Witch finally appeared last August, it was to great acclaim: Chapter 16‘s Susannah Felts called it “an accomplished take on the [fairy-tale] form, artfully deploying many of its traditional elements: a seemingly distant time and place, a dark forest, children, a young person on a quest, and, of course, witches.”
May 4, 2012 Tennessee’s legislative agenda this year has earned the state unwelcome notice in a national media that too often seems downright eager for any chance to portray Southerners as stupid, lazy, and mean. Late-night comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have had particular fun this legislative season with new Tennessee laws governing what may or may not be taught—or even said—by the state’s schoolteachers. So it was an especially welcome surprise to open last Sunday’s edition of The New York Time and find a smart, reasoned, historically nuanced response to the current political climate by an actual Tennessean: novelist Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot.
April 23, 2012 Michael Sims is a curious—but not a nosy—biographer, as Chapter 16‘s Serenity Gerbman pointed out in her review of Sims’s bestselling 2011 book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: “White was famously reclusive and—strange as it may seem for a biographer—Sims understands and respects that need for privacy. Allowing White’s words and experiences to speak for themselves, he offers readers a deeper understanding not only of the life and mind that created Charlotte’s Web, but of the creative process that led to the book and of the sheer work it entailed. The Story of Charlotte’s Web is quite literally that: a biography of the book itself. How did it come to be? What forces and experiences throughout White’s life shaped him and converged to bring his timeless classic into being?”
April 19, 2012 Since last May, when she published a bestselling novel (State of Wonder) and simultaneously announced that she and Karen Hayes were opening a bookstore in Nashville (Parnassus Books, now the most famous independent bookstore in the country), Ann Patchett has been having what she calls “a media-heavy moment.” In fact it’s been a media-heavy year, and the spotlight shows no sign of dimming. Patchett has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, written an op-ed piece for The New York Times, made Time magazine’s list of the hundred most influential people in the world, and appeared on the PBS NewsHour—all in less than thirty-six hours.
