November 15, 2013 Patricia Cornwell turns out a book a year, on average, so it’s never a huge surprise when a new Kay Scarpetta novel hits shelves. The surprise is always in the story itself, and Cornwell has a knack for inventing tales that seem to predict the next wave of media obsession with crime. (After all, her protagonist, Kay Scarpetta, is the original fictional forensic investigator.) This year’s novel, Dust, has just been released.
November 8, 2013 In 2011, when actress Nicole Kidman, who lives in Nashville, optioned Kevin Wilson’s debut novel, The Family Fang, for a feature film, the Sewanee author was dumbfounded. “It’s crazy,” he told Chapter 16’s Tina LoTufo at the time. “That’s the furthest thing from your mind when you’re writing a book. [But] maybe in the back of my head I was thinking if I could write a good-enough novel I would get to meet Nicole Kidman. And it would all be worth it.”
July 12, 2013 Even before Between Shades of Gray hit shelves, it was obvious that Ruta Sepetys’s debut novel was about to take the literary world by storm. Earning four starred reviews—one from every pre-publication review site in the country—is practically unheard of, even for veteran novelists. Between Shades of Gray, pronounced Kirkus, “deserves the widest possible readership.”
May 1, 2013 Beautiful Ruins is a showcase for Jess Walter’s outrageous literary gifts in virtually every genre and style, so it’s no surprise that critics have been outdoing each other with superlatives like “a literary miracle” (NPR), a “high-wire feat of bravura storytelling” (The New York Times Book Review), and “a brilliant, madcap meditation on fate” (Kirkus Reviews). “Why mince words?” wrote Richard Russo: “Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” Walter recently spoke with Chapter 16 prior to his forthcoming event at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 8 at 6:30 p.m.
March 21, 2013 Novelist Anne Lamott has become a kind of patron saint to millions of readers, whole categories of readers, who welcome her advice on parenting, writing, faith, and recovery from addiction. Now Lamott is back, this time with her first grandparenting memoir, Some Assembly Required: A Diary of My Son’s First Son. Written with her son, Sam Lamott, who was nineteen when his child was born, Some Assembly Required is an account of the year Sam learned to be a father and Lamott learned the difficult role of a grandmother: to love recklessly and keep her mouth shut as tightly as possible. On April 3 at 6:15 p.m., Anne Lamott will discuss Some Assembly Required and her new book on faith, Help, Thanks, Wow, and at the Nashville Public Library as part of the a href=”http://nashvillepubliclibrary.org/salonat615/upcoming-salon615-authors/”>Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.
January 28, 2013 When a person takes a late lunch break and heads over to the local bookshop on a mid-week winter afternoon, she might expect to spend a quiet hour in the abandoned stacks.
