Editor's Note
This year’s Southern Festival of Books is a little over a month away, and the schedule of sessions has been announced. Barbara Kingsolver and Yiyun Li will headline pre-festival events on October 11 and October 15, respectively, and the gathering in downtown Nashville gets underway on Saturday, October 17, with authors including Emily Yellin, Ann Patchett, David Haskell, Ayad Akhtar, and Claudia Rankine. The lineup on Sunday, October 18, features Emily Lordi, Silas House, and Ruta Sepetys, among many others. Check out the whole schedule, and don’t miss Chapter 16‘s coverage of festival books, which we’ll be adding to in the weeks ahead.
Today at Chapter 16, Bianca Sass reviews Clutch, the second novel by Emily Nemens. This story of five women confronting midlife explores challenges familiar to us all, but, as Bianca writes, “Nemens captures how these age-old struggles interact with today’s unique flavor of absurdity and mounting existential threats.”
Richard Schweid’s Life on the Octopus Farm considers the ethical and practical dilemmas of turning an intelligent sea creature, long prized as a wild-caught food source, into a mass-produced commodity. In his interview with Chapter 16, Schweid says, “Whether in the end the benefits of fish and seafood aquacultures outweigh the negatives remains to be seen and will ultimately depend on the attitudes of the humans who farm them: Will care be taken to do a sound, sustainable job, or will the only thing that matters be producing the most profit possible?”
Melissa Range’s poetry collection Printer’s Fist, winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, draws on archival research into 19th-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. We share an excerpt from the collection, “Angelina Grimké Ruins Her Clothes.”
News Roundup
- David Dark discussed his book Everyday Apocalypse with The Christian Century.
- Jared Sullivan, Charles Dodd White, and Rachel Louise Martin are among the featured authors for this season’s Tennessee Writes on West TN PBS.
- Caki Wilkinson is the recipient of the 2026 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
- A poem from Marcus Wicker’s Dear Mothership appeared in Literary Hub.
- The new biography of Cormac McCarthy by Tracy Daugherty was reviewed in The Atlantic.
