Margaret Renkl

October 10, 2011 Novelist Jay McInerney’s small, recurring role on the teen television show Gossip Girl is not a cameo performance. Although the character he plays, Jeremiah Harris, is also a novelist with some very McInerneyish characteristics, the resemblance has become less clear as the character has evolved: “All I can say is I’m really glad that I did not let them name the character Jay McInerney, because the character increasingly diverges from me,” the former Nashville resident told New York magazine in an article published today.

October 7, 2011 In good news for the state’s bricks-and-mortar bookstores and other local retailers, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced yesterday that Amazon.com has agreed to begin collecting sales taxes from buyers in the state on January 1, 2014.

October 6, 2011 Ann Patchett’s novel, State of Wonder is one of six finalists for the 2011 Wellcome Trust Book Prize. The award, which will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 9, honors a literary work about health, illness, or medicine. In addition to State of Wonder, finalists this year include two works of nonfiction and three novels. The award carries a prize of £25,000 (about $40,000).

September 30, 2011 Abraham Verghese is becoming well known for his belief in the importance of the kind of bedside examinations that doctors, in his view, too often skip. For Verghese–the author of the novel Cutting for Stone, which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for eighty-seven weeks–physicians who order high-tech diagnostic tests without ever conducting a physical exam are guilty of reducing human beings to “iPatients.”

September 28, 2011 The liquidation of Borders has many publishing-industry analysts—not to mention readers (and at least one bestselling Nashville novelist)—wondering if the bookstore cycle has come full circle: now that Amazon has killed the big-box stores that earlier killed the independents, is it time for the tiny indy bookshop on the corner to make a comeback?