Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Michael Ray Taylor

A Finely Drawn Tragedy

Anna Olswanger’s A Visit to Moscow depicts a modern exodus

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In 1965, an American rabbi investigating persecution of Jews in the former Soviet Union escaped KGB handlers to make a remarkable discovery, as told in A Visit to Moscow, a graphic history by Memphis native Anna Olswanger.

Read more

A Different Dark

Jim Minick captures the human drama of a deadly F5 tornado in Without Warning

Jim Minick’s Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas offers a gripping nonfiction narrative of the deadliest tornado in Kansas history. Minick will speak at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City on November 15.

Read more

Changing Times

In The Forsaken and the Dead, Sidney Thompson portrays the final years of famed lawman Bass Reeves

Sidney Thompson talks with Chapter 16 about his trilogy of novels based on the life of Bass Reeves, a celebrated Black U.S. Marshal. Thompson will appear at Novel in Memphis on November 16.

Read more

An Enlightened Message

In Nature’s Messenger, Patrick Dean follows an 18th-century naturalist of the American South

Nature’s Messenger: Mark Catesby and His Adventures in a New World, the second book from Sewanee-based writer Patrick Dean, relates the history of a little-known man and his greatest achievement. 

Read more

No Laughing Matter?

Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married is a tragicomic memoir of marital crisis

Harrison Scott Key’s new memoir, How to Stay Married, relates his wife’s infidelity, his own loss of faith, and the implosion of his marriage followed by its unlikely resurrection. It’s a hoot. Really.

Read more

Call of the Wild

David George Haskell explores all things acoustic within the natural world

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: David George Haskell’s fourth book, Sounds Wild and Broken, was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Haskell will deliver the keynote address at the Clarksville Writers Conference on June 8. 

Read more
TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING