Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Mountain Meanderings

Ben Anderson chronicles a year in the Smokies

Veteran backcountry volunteer Ben Anderson spent 2016 hiking one million steps—more than 430 miles—on seventy-one different trails in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In Smokies Chronicle, he writes an intimate portrait of each day hike he took in the number-one most visited national park in the country.

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An In-Between Life

Angela Palm’s memoir, Riverine, reckons with the lingering effects of growing up in Nowhere, Indiana

In her memoir of childhood along the Kankakee River, Angela Palm recalls her love for the boy next door, who went to prison before he could escape their dead-end home. Palm will discuss Riverine at Refinery Nashville on June 24 at 6 p.m. The event, sponsored by the Porch Writers’ Collective, is free and open to the public.

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Confounding Brilliance

Scholars ponder Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on its seventy-fifth anniversary

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75, a transatlantic group of scholars reconsiders James Agee’s classic Depression-era account of three Alabama sharecropping families and the problem of representing them in words and images.

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Family Secrets Laid Bare

Ann Patchett talks with Chapter 16 about her bestselling novel Commonwealth

Ann Patchett talks about the paperback edition of her number-one New York Times-bestselling novel Commonwealth, her desire to study acting, how being a bookseller affects her reading list, the nonfiction book she’s writing about women’s suffrage, and the importance of voting in our current age.

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Cheering for the Underdog

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s new middle-grade novel asks whether a pit bull with a past can become an American hero

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s A Dog Like Daisy follows one dog’s struggle to overcome her own unhappy past and ease the pain of a veteran with PTSD. The launch party for A Dog Like Daisy will be held June 22 at 4 p.m. at the Kings’ Chapel Clubhouse in Arrington.

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And All the Devils Are Here

Victoria Schwab concludes her exploration of dark and light in Our Dark Duet

In Our Dark Duet Victoria Schwab brings her YA dystopian fantasy to a riveting conclusion as her characters struggle to conquer their demons and retain their humanity in a collapsing world. Schwab will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 17 at 4:30 p.m. Joining her will be YA novelists Madeleine Roux and Joelle Charbonneau.

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