Chapter 16 - Part 255

A Castle on a Mountaintop

Denise Kiernan tells the story of building the Biltmore

By Hamilton Cain | September 8, 2017

In The Last Castle Denise Kiernan tells the story of George W. Vanderbilt, who hired famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted to build him the largest private residence in the U.S. Kiernan will discuss The Girls of Atomic City at the Grove Theater in Oak Ridge on September 15 at 6 p.m. as part of the city’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. She will discuss The Last Castle at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, which will be held in Nashville October 13-15.

Miraculous Subtlety

Ann Beattie talks with Chapter 16 about the literary wizardry of Peter Taylor

By Ed Tarkington | September 7, 2017

“Peter was a prankster,” says Ann Beattie, who knew Peter Taylor as a reader and as a friend. Editor of the Library of America’s new edition of Taylor’s complete stories and author of The Accomplished Guest, a new story collection of her own, Beattie will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

Memphis Reads

Markus Zusak talks with Chapter 16 about his YA classic, The Book Thief

By Peggy Burch | September 6, 2017

Australian author Markus Zusak, whose novel The Book Thief is the 2017 Memphis Reads selection, will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 11 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 12 at 7 p.m. Both talks are free and open to the public.

Channeling Restless Spirits

Jesmyn Ward returns to familiar Gulf Coast territory in Sing, Unburied, Sing

By Peggy Burch | September 5, 2017

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward will be in Nashville to talk about her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in which a Mississippi family grapples with drugs, grief, and ghosts. She’ll appear at Parnassus Books on September 12 at 6:30 p.m.

“In Which I Play the Part of Myself”

Book Excerpt: Every Room in the Body

By Kerri French | September 1, 2017

Kerri French is the author of Every Room in the Body, winner of the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award, and Instruments of Summer, a chapbook of poems about the life of Amy Winehouse. She will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

Everyone Fights an American War

Omar El Akkad’s novel imagines a dystopia of partisan political divisions

By Erica Ciccarone | August 31, 2017

In Omar El Akkad’s American War, an environmental crisis leads to a second civil war in the United States. El Akkad will appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 13-15.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher