Chapter 16 - Part 20

Vagabonds and Gurus

In Darcey Steinke’s novel Sister Golden Hair, the spiritual path encompasses everything from Bibles to Bowie

By Emily Choate | October 14, 2014

October 14, 2014 When Jesse’s father gets thrown out of the Methodist ministry in the early seventies, her family enters the vagabond spiritual path so prominent in that era, and Jesse negotiates her awkward ride into adolescence through encounters with her semi-transient neighbors. Darcey Steinke will discuss her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on October 16, 2014, at 5:30 p.m.

The World Remade

In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a death onstage heralds the collapse of the modern era

By Emily Choate | September 8, 2014

September 8, 2014 A novel with enormous scope and an ambitious time-jumping structure, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven paints its post-apocalyptic world in both bold brushstrokes and tiny points of background detail. Mandel will discuss Station Eleven at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 10-12.

A Note So Pure

Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs sends four small-town friends into a tangle of heartbreak

By Emily Choate | August 26, 2014

August 26, 2014 The four friends at the center of Nickolas Butler’s debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, teeter between nostalgia for the young guys they once were and hopes for the men they will become. Now in their mid-thirties, they have begun to feel the weight of the choices they’ve already made. Nickolas Butler will discuss Shotgun Lovesongs at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.

Alone Together

Richard Bausch’s Before, During, After is a 9/11 novel that intertwines the upheavals of violence and love

By Emily Choate | August 6, 2014

August 6, 2014 In Richard Bausch’s new novel, Before, During, After, the events of 9/11 rush Michael Faulk and his fiancée, Natasha Barrett, into a new era. Poised to begin their new life together in Memphis, they find that their experiences of that day have cast their love, and their future, into danger.

Good Medicine

A Chapter 16 contributor returns to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference

By Emily Choate | July 17, 2014

July 18, 2014 Two summers ago, when I learned I’d been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, I was weeks into a debilitating illness that had left me unable to walk and unsure how much mobility I’d ever regain. I was in constant pain, barely able to stand up on crutches. My friends and family tried to look supportive when I insisted that I would be well enough to go to Sewanee. Then they’d find a tactful way to ask me whether I’d ever seen the University of the South—all those steep hills and narrow stone steps.

Little Things

Lisa Howorth’s Flying Shoes blends dark humor and grief in a character-driven story about the consequences of murder

By Emily Choate | June 16, 2014

June 16, 2014 In Lisa Howorth’s debut novel, Flying Shoes, Mary Byrd Thornton’s eccentric small-town world is disrupted by a call that unearths memories her family would rather forget. Howorth will discuss Flying Shoes at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 19, 2014, at 6:30 p.m., and at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on July 10, 2014.

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