Madison Smartt Bell remembers his early days in New York City
January 10, 2012 “I arrived in New York in 1979, without a literary blueprint,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in a new essay for The Millions. “I was a Southern boy, from rural Middle Tennessee (okay, by way of Princeton, I admit). My favorite writers at that time were Dostoevsky and Harry Crews. I didn’t know that a contemporary urban fiction existed.”
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Poets and writers around the country consider the poetic legacy of Eleanor Ross Taylor, who died last weekend at age ninety-one
January 6, 2012 In honor of the achievements of Eleanor Ross Taylor, and to mark her passing last Friday, Chapter 16 contacted poets and novelists around the country to ask for their impressions of a writer who spent much of her literary life in the shadow of her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Peter Taylor, but who quietly continued her own work with passion and dedication during their fifty-one years together—and for more than a decade beyond his death. Through the comments of Betty Adcock, Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Mark Jarman, Don Share, Dave Smith, and R.T. Smith, what emerges is a collaborative portrait of a woman who was quiet, modest, and gentle but whose poems were uncompromising, sharp, and (in a word that comes up again and again) fierce.
Read moreBuzz is building for a new children’s book by Silas House and Neela Vaswani
January 5, 2012 Former Harrogate poet and novelist Silas House tends to be published by small literary presses without a huge budget for marketing, but his books always seem to find their way into the national spotlight anyway. Consider what Publisher’s Weekly has to say–in a starred review, no less–about Same Sun Here, the new middle-grade novel by House and his coauthor, Neela Vaswani:
Read moreAlan Lightman explains why what we understand to be true about the universe may not be true in other universes
December 20, 2011 There are laws, not made by humans but discovered by them, that explain the workings of the universe in perfectly clear, precise terms, notes Memphis native Alan Lightman in a new essay for Harper’s:
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With the launch of both a bestselling novel and the most widely-hailed new bookstore in the country, Ann Patchett has had a year of wonders indeed
December 16, 2011 Last June Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes were only in the earliest planning stages of their new bookstore—which didn’t yet have a location, a staff, or even a name—when Patchett left on a book tour to promote her new novel, State of Wonder. Clearly the store, more a hope and a dream than anything resembling a place of business, was in no way ready to be the subject of a national media blitz, but the timing couldn’t be helped: free publicity is something no independent bookstore is in a position to turn down. According to Patchett’s account in an interview with Chapter 16, she asked Hayes, “Do you want me to talk about this on book tour? I’m going to be doing this media-heavy moment.” Truer words were never spoken.
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Critics loved Michael Sims’s new biography of E.B. White
December 15, 2011 Despite the appearance this year of The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, and the imminent arrival of The Dead Witness, his two most recent forays as an editor, for Michael Sims 2011 was unarguably the year of The Story of Charlotte’s Web. This slim volume—a biography not so much of E.B. White as of the book for which he is best remembered—has found its way onto best-of-the-year lists all over the media, and inspired rhapsodic reviews. Today Chapter 16 surveys the praise:
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