Editor's Note
It’s a little difficult in these hot, humid days to fantasize about wandering around Bicentennial Mall in the crisp air of an October weekend, but the 2026 Southern Festival of Books will be here before you know it. This week, Chapter 16 considers a book by one of this year’s festival authors, poet Asa Drake. Reviewer sam long writes that Maybe the Body is “a fierce and precise debut poetry collection about love, family, memory, and what it means to belong to a place that betrays the bodies it holds.”
Reviewer Tina Chambers takes a ride with Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run, a collection of travel articles and “backstory” commentary by Lawrence Wells and Dean Faulkner Wells. “Dean and Larry come across as pleasant, knowledgeable guides,” Tina writes, “always game for adventure, whose quiet confidence and ease with people bring their stories to life.”
We complete this week’s trio of offerings with an excerpt from Noah Soltau’s new poetry collection, Titanfall, which was shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. “Ochs Highway, 7:34 p.m.” meditates on a drive at sunset when “Honeysuckle rhododendron mountain laurel / and the tourists’ burning brakes perfume the air.”
News Roundup
- Ruta Sepetys was interviewed for The PEN Ten.
- Porchlight is accepting entries through October 31 for the second annual William Gay Memorial Prize in Short Story.
- Richard Bausch’s The Fate of Others was reviewed in America Magazine.
- A poem by Blas Falconer was featured by Queer Poem-A-Day.
- Charles Dodd White shared a passage from his work-in-progress on The Essay Desk.
