Chapter 16 - Part 147

A Glorious and Invisible Map

In M.O. Walsh’s endearing new novel, a strange machine disrupts life in a small Southern town

By Michael Ray Taylor | September 21, 2020

The Big Door Prize, a new novel from M.O. Walsh, poses a big what if: What if a vending machine could read your DNA and provide your “potential life station?” The answers shake up residents of a small Southern town in ways that are by turns comical and profound. Walsh will discuss the novel at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Traitor to Whom?

Amanda McCrina’s YA novel explores shifting allegiances in a time of conflict

By Sarah Carter | September 18, 2020

Franklin writer Amanda McCrina’s new YA novel, Traitor, follows Toyla, a young soldier whose family heritage embodies both sides of a wartime conflict in the city of Lwów.

Following the Story Wherever It Goes

After three decades in children’s books, acclaimed author-illustrator David Wiesner is still eager to innovate

By Julie Danielson | September 17, 2020

David Wiesner talks to Chapter 16 about his newest picture book, Robobaby, and returning to the Southern Festival of Books after nearly 30 years. Wiesner will appear at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

The Singing Wire Between Joy and Grief

You Want More spans the career of one of the South’s most beloved storytellers

By Ed Tarkington | September 16, 2020

With You Want More: Selected Stories, Hub City Press delivers a career retrospective of the writer The New York Times called “among the great pillars of Southern literature.” George Singleton will discuss the book with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips at a virtual event hosted by Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on September 28 and will appear at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

A Multitude of Elegies

Ayad Akhtar creates a powerful literary assemblage in Homeland Elegies

By Hamilton Cain | September 15, 2020

Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies is a dazzling, genre-busting book, a work of autofiction with the potential to shock us out of our complacency. Akhtar will discuss the book at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Dim Lights, Dark Hallways

In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist tries to makes sense of her family’s unraveling

By Sean Kinch | September 14, 2020

In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty, a first-generation American whose family immigrated from Ghana, learns young that religion cannot explain her family’s misfortunes, so she turns to science for answers. Gyasi will discuss Transcendent Kingdom at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher