Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Death-Defying Feats

Four siblings reckon with a fortune teller’s prophecy in Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists

In Chloe Benjamin’s dazzling new novel, four siblings set down an uneasy path after a fortune teller reveals the dates on which each one of them will die. Benjamin will discuss The Immortalists at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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Suffused with Color and Light and Personality

The Afterlives is a departure for Thomas Pierce

At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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Setting Fire to Jim Crow

In his latest satiric novel, Gerald Duff skewers the vestiges of antebellum Nashville

Starting from an actual 1967 forum featuring South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Martin Luther King Jr., activist Stokely Carmichael, and beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Gerald Duff’s Nashville Burning looks at three consecutive Aprils of violence and change at Vanderbilt and other parts of the Music City.

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Remembering the Ghost

Sharyn McCrumb’s latest historical novel revisits a murder trial with a supernatural twist

The Unquiet Grave, Sharyn McCrumb’s latest historical novel, is based on a true story, chronicling the notorious trial of a horse-stealing blacksmith accused of strangling his third wife to death in 1897.

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Context Matters

Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts explore the pitfalls when we talk across cultural barriers

In Getting Through, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts illuminate the way we communicate across cultures, with stakes for our everyday interactions.

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So Let Me Burn

In Fire Sermon, Jamie Quatro explores the intersections of love, obsession, and spirituality

With virtuosic lyricism and the striking juxtaposition of religious and erotic obsession, Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon delivers an unforgettable and astonishingly original portrait of the moral and psychological consequences of unfaithfulness. Quatro will discuss Fire Sermon at Arts Build in Chattanooga on January 11 and at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 6.

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