Editor's Note

There are still tickets available for the October 29 evening at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center with Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben. Ann Patchett will moderate the conversation about Witherspoon and Coben’s co-authored thriller, Gone Before Goodbye — and no doubt a few other subjects, as well. Proceeds from the event benefit Humanities Tennessee. Don’t miss it!

Today at Chapter 16, Zane McNeill discusses Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion. This chronicle of notable events in LGBTQ+ history, McNeill says, can help us “gain a profoundly different understanding of the past — as well as a better understanding of our current political moment.” A better understanding of, well, everything is the subject of David Dark’s Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World. We’re featuring an excerpt, “The Healing Game of Art.” And we round out this week’s offerings with Tina Chambers’ review of the latest novel by Sheri Joseph, Angels at the Gate, set at a fictionalized Sewanee: University of the South.

News Roundup

• Boyce Upholt has founded Southlands, a media project devoted to exploring and celebrating the wild South. 

• Tova Mirvis is partnering with Jewish Book Council to launch Nu Reads, a project to promote Jewish literature.

• Ishmael Reed is editor-in-chief of Tar Baby, a quarterly journal published by the Toni Morrison Foundation. 

• Silas House paid tribute to Appalachian writer and documentarian Gurney Norman.