Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

The Earth Remembers

Anna-Marie McLemore weaves a tale of cursed families and forbidden love

The cursed characters in Anna-Marie McLemore’s magical-realist novel, Wild Beauty, have the power to bring plants into bloom, but the people they love are doomed to vanish. McLemore will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.

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Portal of the Years

Rodney Jones’s novel in verse, Village Prodigies, roves the lives of six childhood friends

Rodney Jones’s powerful novel in verse picks through the memories of six young men from a small Southern town. Jones will discuss Village Prodigies at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

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Religion and Dogs and Woods

Clyde Edgerton talks with Chapter 16 about the Southern literary landscape

Two of Clyde Edgerton’s beloved early novels, Raney and The Floatplane Notebooks, have been reissued by the University of South Carolina Press in its Southern Revivals series. Edgerton will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

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Reading, Thinking, Grieving, Drinking

In The Futilitarians, Anne Gisleson limns grief, loss, crisis, and regeneration

In 2011, still recovering from the loss of her twin sisters (to suicide) and her beloved father (to leukemia), Anne Gisleson helped form the Existential Crisis Reading Group: a book club bent on exploring the big questions through reading and discussion. Gisleson will discuss The Futilitarians at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.

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The Most Wanted Man Since Dillinger

Philip Jett gives a nonfiction account of the 1960 manhunt for a Colorado killer in The Death of an Heir

Philip Jett’s The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder that Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty is a gripping tale in which wealth and privilege fail to shield a family from suffering. Jett will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15, and at Novel in Memphis on October 25.

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Sing for Our Time, Too

In The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash explores the bloody history of Depression-era textile mills

In The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash delivers a searing account of the conflict between labor and ownership in the textile mills of early twentieth-century Appalachia. Cash will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15, and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on October 12 at 6 p.m.

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