Chapter 16 - Part 19

Exquisite Intricacy

Bobbie Ann Mason talks to Chapter 16 about drawing art out of life

By Ed Tarkington | July 23, 2012

July 23, 2012 Since her first published story, “Offerings,” was plucked from the slush pile in 1980 by New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell, Bobbie Ann Mason has fashioned a career that is far more unique and distinct than its association with literary movements such as the “Dirty Realism” or “Minimalist” style might imply. Mason’s stories and novels are at heart studies in intimacy: the private, painstaking, sometimes brutally honest examination of interior lives, written in a style that suggests a private, unspoken confidence between reader and author. Bobbie Ann Mason will discuss The Girl in the Blue Beret at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14 at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

The Old Grief of Blood

Tom Franklin’s new whodunit is a searing meditation on the nature of friendship and loss

By Ed Tarkington | July 19, 2012

July 19, 2012 In Tom Franklin’s latest novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter—the novel’s title is derived from an old method for teaching elementary school students how to spell Mississippi—simultaneously paradisiacal and perilous forests form the thematic center of a compelling literary thriller that skillfully blends the conventions of crime fiction with sensitive examinations of Faulkner Country’s inescapable concerns: race, love, family secrets, and the twin demons of longing and regret. Franklin will discuss Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter at the twenty-fourth annual Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14, 2012, at Legislative Plaza in Nashville. All events are free and open to the public.

Up Close and Personal

Just in time for the London Summer Olympics, Chris Cleave—author of the international bestseller Little Bee—delivers a poignant and suspenseful tale about the interior lives of elite track cyclists

By Ed Tarkington | July 18, 2012

July 18, 2012 Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee enjoyed enormous critical and popular success. A devastatingly emotional but immensely readable tale about a young Nigerian refugee and a suburban London woman whose lives are drawn together by happenstance, Little Bee became a surprise hit, largely due to word of mouth. The novel has over two million copies in print and is being developed into a film by Nicole Kidman. Now, with Gold, his sweeping new novel about an intense competition between two Olympic cyclists, Cleave is poised to repeat that success. He will discuss and sign copies of Gold on July 24 at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series at the Nashville Public Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Unreasonable Schemes

With Canada, Richard Ford returns to the bleak, forbidding landscapes of the Northwest and the thwarted lives of those who inhabit them

By Ed Tarkington | June 7, 2012

June 7, 2012 In the years since the publication of Independence Day (1995)—the first novel ever to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize—Richard Ford has achieved rare and lofty status as a cherished American institution, regarded mostly as a gifted chronicler of fin-de-siècle suburban angst in the tradition of Cheever, Updike, Richard Yates, and Ford’s fellow Mississippian Walker Percy. Richard Ford will discuss his new book, Canada, at the Nashville Public Library on June 14. The event is part of the Salon@615 series and will begin with a reception at 6:15 p.m. Both the reception and the reading are free and open to the public.

The Music of Suffering

In The Cove, acclaimed novelist Ron Rash returns to the mountains of Western North Carolina to deliver a haunting story of doomed love in the shadow of World War I

By Ed Tarkington | May 10, 2012

May 10, 2012 “If you haven’t already found a woman who will break your heart, find one,” writes Ron Rash in his new novel. “The suffering will be good for you.” A spare, lyrical novel, The Cove juxtaposes the legendarily haunted and severe environs of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the simmering anxiety of the Great War. Rash will read from and discuss The Cove at Nashville Public Library on May 16, as part of the Salon@615 series . The event will begin with a reception at 6:15 p.m., followed by a reading at 6:45. Both are free and open to the public.

The Cape Act

In The One, music journalist R.J. Smith makes an impassioned case for the Godfather of Soul as the most important American musician of the twentieth century

By Ed Tarkington | April 4, 2012

April 4, 2012 R.J. Smith can’t be accused of objectivity—his abject adoration of James Brown seeps onto nearly every page—but his acclaimed new bio of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business is exhaustively researched and makes a square accounting of Brown’s triumphs, humiliations, and criminal excesses. R.J. Smith will discuss The One: The Life and Music of James Brown in Nashville at Parnassus Books on April 5 at 6:30 p.m., and at Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center on April 6 at 9 a.m. Both events are free and open to the public, but the Vanderbilt event requires a reservation. Email heather.lefkowitz@vanderbilt.edu for admission.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses