Editor's Note
Michael Zibart, founder of Nashville-based BookPage, passed away on September 5. In an Instagram post, Zibart was remembered as “a visionary and kind leader whose storied career in the book business led to the creation of BookPage in 1988. He was a mentor and friend to many, and will be deeply missed.” The Zibart family has a long history of serving the literary community in Nashville as booksellers, and a historical marker commemorating both Zibart’s Books and Records and neighboring R.M. Mills Bookstore was unveiled on September 6.
Today at Chapter 16, Eve Hutcherson reviews Living in the Present with John Prine, Tom Piazza’s account of his friendship with Prine and their joint work on Prine’s memoir, which was cut short by the songwriter’s death in 2020. Eve describes the book as “profound in its simplicity, mirroring Prine’s work in its depiction of the man’s own resilience and frailty and his delight in living.” Sean Kinch reviews Hanna Pittard’s novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You, an unsparing fictional account of the author’s own post-divorce drama, though Sean notes that the book’s appeal “lies in its witty prose and the protagonist’s zany misadventures, not in its fidelity to real-life events.” Margaret Kingsbury considers The Martian Contingency, the latest installment in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, a fresh take on sci-fi that “embraces women’s perspectives and shows that collective action and cooperation are essential to successful space travel.”
News Roundup
- Tiana Clark’s collection Scorched Earth was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry.
- An excerpt from The Shape of Wonder by Alan Lightman and Martin Rees appeared at Literary Hub.
- The Bottom in Knoxville is holding a Bottomless Pie fundraiser on September 20.
- The Meacham Writers Conference will be held at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on September 24-27.
- A poem by John Jeremiah Sullivan was published in The Yale Review.
