Editor's Note
A reminder for readers attending the Southern Festival of Books: There are tickets available for Authors in the Round, festival volunteers are needed, and there’s still time to register for the pre-festival writing workshops. The party is just three weeks away!
Ayad Akhtar will be at the festival to discuss his new novel, The Radiance. In her review for Chapter 16 today, Sara Beth West describes the book as a “meditation on the self, on trauma, and on the power of fiction to change us.”
In her review of Lydia Mathis’ debut story collection, Desperate Bodies, Emily Choate writes, “Mathis’ protagonists share an intense, at times almost dissociated, sense of isolation. Most of these stories press into their protagonists’ off-kilter subjectivity in ways that haunt or unnerve.”
Nashville poet Dana Malone used her musical studies and her journalism and speechwriting career to give form to the poems in Everyone Begotten, Everything Holy (Poems and Libretto). We share an excerpt from the collection, “Lacrimosa: Charleston (Mother Emanuel, Walter Scott).”
News Roundup
- Submissions are open through October 1 for the 2026 Porch Prize.
- Entries for the William Gay Memorial Prize in Short Story are open through October 31.
- Newly unsealed documents reveal that tech companies were aware that training AI on copyrighted books was illegal, reports Publishers Weekly.
- Nonfiction by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood appeared in Cutleaf.
