Margaret Renkl

November 7, 2011 Michael Sims must be getting used to rave reviews. Following a summer of praise for The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, now in its third printing, Sims is already earning accolades for his next book.

November 2, 2011 At Chapter 16 we extend our heartiest congratulations to Will Campbell, who has been named the Tennessee Writers Alliance 2011 Literary Legend, and to Bill Brown, the 2011 Writer of the Year. According to the TWA’s website,

Since 2006, the Tennessee Writers Alliance has been recognizing writers through two awards, the Tennessee Writer of the Year Award and the Tennessee Literary Legend Award. The purpose of these awards, each given annually, is to recognize writers who have contributed to the literary heritage of the state.

November 1, 2011 An aspiring novelist in need of cheering up has two options for inspiration, and which one works best depends on the struggling scribe’s age. Young writers take heart from the stories of novelists whose first books were rejected by literary agents an outrageous number of times before finally being published and shooting instantly to the top of the bestseller lists (c.f. The Help by Kathryn Stockett, rejected sixty times). Writers well past the first bloom of youth, however, tend to have retired any crazy dreams of riding to wealth and fame on the back of a bestseller. If you’ve been writing in lonely obscurity for decades, the inspirational tales you collect tend to feature noble geniuses who never, ever give up, who slog on despite the the derision of family members and the indifference of agents, and who are eventually discovered by a visionary editor, finally seeing print sometime in middle age or later—older than you, at least.

October 17, 2011 Maybe the tide is finally turning: after losing six bookstores across the state last winter and spring, Tennessee has four new stores open or on the way this fall: Union Ave. Books in Knoxville, Parnassus Books and Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt in Nashville, and now The Grumpy Bookpeddler in Murfreesboro. The Daily News Journal has the story of Alan and Carol Wollard, an Illinois couple who followed their dream to own a bookstore to Middle Tennessee. Read more about them and The Grumpy Bookpeddler here.

October 12, 2011 Thanks to her almost preternaturally canny use of social media, conventional media, and real-live human connections, Rebecca Skloot had a bestseller on her hands the very day The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hit shelves last year. The book has since gone on to make the former University of Memphis science writer virtually a household name, and today a press release from Random House explains why: