Chapter 16 - Part 12

Scarpetta's Back

Patricia Cornwell’s latest book isn’t the only new release for the crime novelist

By Margaret Renkl | November 15, 2013

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.

Getting Closer

With Jason Bateman joining Nicole Kidman on the project, Kevin Wilson’s bestselling novel, The Family Fang, is surely headed for the big screen

By Margaret Renkl | November 8, 2013

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.”

A Nashville Cross of the Knight

YA novelist Ruta Sepetys has received a medal from the Lithuanian government for contributions to literature and education

By Margaret Renkl | July 12, 2013

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.”

Resisting the Noise

Jess Walter talks about his problem with Al Gore, the difficulty of signing a human breast, how Shakespeare would fare in Hollywood, and why it took fifteen years to write his newest novel, Beautiful Ruins

By Margaret Renkl | May 1, 2013

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.

Helplessly in Love

Chapter 16 talks with Anne Lamott about her faith, her new grandson, and why she believes kids are sometimes better off in single-parent homes

By Margaret Renkl | March 21, 2013

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.

Superbooks Sunday

On game day, Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes will be featured on Oprah’s network, OWN

By Margaret Renkl | January 26, 2013

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.

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down