August 22, 2011 In a conversation about his acclaimed novel The Typist, UTK creative-writing professor Michael Knight talks with Chapter 16 about taking on history, the Southern literary tradition, and living with a Roll Tide heart in Volunteer country. Knight will discuss The Typist at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on August 27 at 6 p.m.
August 9, 2011 In his debut novel, The Snow Whale, MTSU creative-writing professor John Minichillo uses Melville’s Moby-Dick as a touchstone for a satirical juxtaposition of the trivialities of cubicle culture with the wilds of Northern Alaska, where men still hunt whales—to consequences both hilarious and unexpectedly moving. Today Minichillo talks with Chapter 16 about the challenges of imagining a traditional whale hunt, finding a venue for unconventional fiction in small-press publishing, and taking on the Great American Whale.
July 14, 2011 Joe Henry has made a career of his gift for penning unforgettable lyrics. He has worked with a variety of artists in multiple genres, from Vince Gill and Garth Brooks to John Denver and Burt Bacharach, and his songs have been recorded by artists as disparate as Frank Sinatra and Rascal Flatts. In Lime Creek, his debut work of fiction, Henry translates his gift for the transcendent insight and the unforgettable turn of phrase into an extended meditation on the lives of a ranching family in the high country of the mountain West.
May 10, 2011 Library shelves are heavy with testimonials to the value of literature: more recently, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon and How to Read and Why, or, for the previous generation, the works of Northrop Frye or Charles Van Doren, to name only a few. Arnold Weinstein’s Morning, Noon, and Night deviates from the formula chiefly by steering away from pedagogical sermons and, instead, inviting its readers to examine themselves through life’s stages—growing up and growing old; innocence and experience; love and death—with a verve and generosity atypical of literary criticism. In fact, it’s almost unfair to call Morning, Noon, and Night a work of criticism; it stands more as an act of interpretive advocacy.
April 20, 2011 When Dean Faulkner Wells was thirteen, she attended the premier of Intruder in the Dust at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family. With the spotlight shining on William Faulkner, Wells came to a dawning understanding of her uncle’s role in literature—and in the world. Now the author of a new memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, she talks with Chapter 16 about William Faulkner’s literary legacy, how her extended family wrestled with the Civil Rights movement, and why Cormac McCarthy should win the Nobel Prize. Wells will present a slide show and discuss Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 21 at 5 p.m.
March 10, 2011 Few contemporary novelists can match Tom Perrotta’s gift for skewering the delusions and pretensions of suburbia. From his breakthrough novel Election, a vicious send-up of a high-school campaign for student-body president; through the acclaimed Little Children, about a stay-at-home dad’s unlikely affair with another mom; to The Abstinence Teacher, a pointed and frequently hilarious satire in which a high-school sex-education teacher butts heads with the evangelical right, Perrotta maintains a generous sympathy for the poor souls forced to navigate the calamities of suburban life. He answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to his appearance at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on March 17 at 7 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 126.
