Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Sean Kinch

Prophets of Doom

In Christopher Hebert’s Angels of Detroit, young idealists believe they must destroy the city to save it

AngelsOfDetroitjkt (1)Christopher Hebert’s new novel, Angels of Detroit, features a cast of characters who believe that the apocalypse is coming, and humanity is too narcotized or distracted to pay attention. Hebert will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on July 17, 2016, at 2 p.m. and at the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on August 29, 2016, at 7 p.m.

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A Demon-Haunted Land

In Julia Franks’s debut novel Over the Plain Houses, a Depression-era farm wife seeks solace in the wilderness

June 16, 2016 In Julia Franks’s Over the Plain Houses, set in western North Carolina farm country in 1939, a married woman begins to fill the witching hours of night by roaming the wild hills surrounding her farm. Her husband, an evangelical preacher, becomes convinced that his once-pious wife has repudiated God. Franks will discuss Over the Plain Houses at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 23, 2016, at 6 p.m.

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Contracts with the Devil

In Jennifer Haigh’s new novel, Heat and Light, energy companies choose profits over safety

May 9, 2016 With Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh joins the grand American tradition of the social-protest novel. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck before her, she wields a quixotic sword against corporate corruption and malfeasance—in this case, fracking. Haigh will read from Heat and Light at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 12, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

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The Revised Rules for Caregiving

In Julia Claiborne Johnson’s comic novel, Be Frank with Me, a reclusive novelist needs help raising her difficult son

April 8, 2016 The premise of Julia Claiborne Johnson’s debut novel, Be Frank With Me, sounds like a winning Hollywood pitch: a reclusive author who’s published nothing since achieving phenomenal success decades earlier is forced to write again when she loses her fortune to a Madoff-style swindler.

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A Theory of Love and History

In fiction and essays, Julian Barnes proves that truth is multiple

March 21, 2016 Reading Julian Barnes is a paradoxical pleasure: the author makes clear, in book after book, that literature provides no reassurances, no uncanny access to wisdom or happiness, no affirmation to troubled readers—and yet the experience of reading his work is strangely comforting. Now seventy, Barnes keeps exploring profound questions and continues to produce brilliantly conflicting answers. He will give a free public reading at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Hall in Nashville on March 23, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

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Explosive Passions

Ariel Lawhon’s Flight of Dreams re-imagines the final voyage of the Hindenburg

February 16, 2016 Ariel Lawhon’s new novel, Flight of Dreams, is a historical mystery that imagines the real cause of the Hindenburg’s explosion. While private drama occupies the foreground of Lawhon’s story, the specter of Hitler is never far from the characters’ minds. Lawhon will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 24, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

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