Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Through a Great Wilderness

A songwriter navigates the Nashville music scene in Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody

It’s an old tale—boy meets girl; boy trades girl for a shot at fame; boy comes to regret that last part. Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody is a love song to music—but not to the music business.

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Current State

The stories in Matthew Baker’s Hybrid Creatures are perfectly tuned to the twenty-first century

Matthew Baker’s new story collection, Hybrid Creatures, tracks the quests of four brilliant, lonely misfits. Together they add up to something like a collage of one anguished archetype.

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Lucky Thirteen

Jerry Joyner’s inventive 1975 collaboration with Remy Charlip hits shelves in a new edition

Thirteen, Jerry Joyner’s 1975 collaboration with artist Remy Charlip, returns to shelves this month in a new edition for a new generation of young readers. Joyner will visit Parnassus Books on May 23 to discuss the book, as well as his remarkable career.

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Written in a Fever

Songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler’s Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, is a beguiling tale of an astonishing life

In Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout, songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler chronicles his life from Depression-era Appalachia to Yale, New York, and Nashville. Told with charm and detail, his story celebrates creativity and a well-lived life

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A New Disequilibrium

Former Nashvillian David Arnold returns to Music City to launch his third YA novel

David Arnold’s depiction of teen life is heavily seasoned with dialogue in which teens have their say—in authentic, funny voices—about the absurdities of the now. Arnold will discuss The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 22 at 6:30 p.m. He will appear in conversation with novelists Courtney J. Stevens and Jeff Zentner.

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Her Father’s Words

Tara Westover’s memoir is an excruciating account of her escape from fundamentalism

Tara Westover’s Educated joins the ranks of fearless modern-day memoirs of abuse and adversity such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Westover will appear at Lipscomb University in Nashville on May 21 at 6:30 p.m.

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