Editor's Note
It’s May already. How did that happen? Hard to believe that we’re not even six full months away from the 2026 Southern Festival of Books, but it’ll be here before we know it, and planning is already well underway. If you subscribe to the newsletters for Humanities Tennessee and the festival, you already know that the reveal party will be held on June 18 this year at the Donelson branch of the Nashville Public Library. More info will be available soon for those who’d like to attend. Mark your calendars! And a note to authors: Submissions for the festival remain open through May 31.
This week at Chapter 16, Sean Kinch reviews Delivery, a new novel by Christopher Hebert. The story follows Gabe, a young athlete struggling with a debilitating injury, romantic disappointment, and few prospects for the future. “No outward sign corresponds to his inward pain,” Sean writes, “yet with every step he fears a recurrence of the feeling that he’d stepped on a ‘rusted nail.’ He worries he’ll never live up to the hype.”
Sarah Norris reviews Mercy Hill, the debut novel by Hannah Thurman, which sets a family drama in the fraught and sometimes dangerous setting of a mental hospital threatened with closing. Sarah notes that “Thurman’s writing is often striking: precise, lyrical, and attentive to the smallest emotional shifts. She captures the contradictions of familial love with nuance, allowing admiration and resentment to coexist without resolution.”
We round out the week’s offerings with a second look at Chris Moody’s 2022 interview with award-winning novelist and short story writer Brandon Taylor. In a discussion of his deep family roots in Alabama, Taylor says, “I think the governing attitudes of my work are deeply Southern. There’s something about my characters — a dry, amused, resignatory orientation to the world — that feels very Southern to me. A bantery, quick-wittedness feels quite Southern to me. And also a sort of constantly brooding sinfulness. There’s something quite romantic to Southerners. There’s something mournful and longing in them.”
News Roundup
- Bradley Sides weighed in on his predictions for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Electric Literature. (The Pulitzer winners are due to be announced this afternoon.)
- The Rutherford County Library Alliance will be honored with the PEN/Benenson Courage Award at the 2026 PEN America Literary Gala on May 14 in New York.
- The cover of Wayétu Moore’s forthcoming novel was revealed at Brittle Paper.
- A poem by Linda Parsons appeared at Anti-Heroin Chic.
- Work by Sarah Cummins Small, Richard Alley, and Ian Hall appears in the latest edition of Porchlight.
