Chapter 16 - Part 28

Off the Map

With State of Wonder, her sixth novel, Ann Patchett reinvents literary fiction—again

By Margaret Renkl | June 22, 2011

June 22, 2011 Ann Patchett first made bestseller lists with her transcendent 2001 novel, Bel Canto, the story of an international group of businessmen, diplomats, and politicians—and one opera diva—who are held hostage by terrorists in the vice-presidential palace of an unnamed Latin American country. In State of Wonder, Patchett returns to the jungle, this time to the central Amazon basin, a vast but impenetrable landscape where the air “is heavy enough to be bitten and chewed,” and insects fly “with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses” of human beings. There’s a magnificent chapter set in an opera house and the kind of chaotic market scene that’s more or less required of a novel set in an equatorial country, but the real point of this book is to get its protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, out of suburbia, away from her phone, and into “the beating heart of nowhere”—a jungle teeming with spiders, snakes, quicksand, and cannibals. Patchett will discuss State of Wonder at the Nashville Public Library on June 28, 6:15 p.m., as part of the Salon@615 series.

A Father's Gift of Space

In a new essay in The Huffington Post, Margaret Lazarus Dean remembers her father

By Margaret Renkl | June 20, 2011

June 20, 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean didn’t become an astronaut, but the Knoxville novelist’s debut book, The Time It Takes to Fall (2007), required a detailed understanding of astrophysics and of the specific conditions that led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Now, in an new essay in The Huffington Post, Dean explains where her love of space missions came from, and pays tribute to her father, who, Saturday after Saturday, took her to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC., when she was a child:

Far From Lost

William Gay gives a rare on-camera interview to The Oxford American

By Margaret Renkl | June 16, 2011

June 16, 2011 In the June edition of “SoLost,” The Oxford American‘s series of original videos that celebrate the art of getting lost in “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” novelist William Gay, who normally shuns recorded interviews, invited a camera into his Hohenwald cabin, where he proceeded to talk with eloquence about his hometown, his work, and how his repeated playing of a Bob Dylan tune once inspired a girlfriend to walk out: “She dumped me over that song,” he explains, deadpan.

"It's a Gift I Want to Give the City I Love"

Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes talk with Chapter 16 about their new bookstore—Parnassus Books

By Margaret Renkl | June 13, 2011

June 13, 2011 Last Wednesday, novelist Ann Patchett appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to discuss her new novel, State of Wonder. It was in many ways a routine discussion about a much-anticipated book by the bestselling author of Bel Canto and Truth & Beauty (among many others), but nearly an hour into the conversation, Patchett casually dropped a bombshell: she and a business partner, former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes, were about to open a new bookstore in Nashville, a city that has been without one for the last six months. “I don’t know if I’m opening an ice shop in the age of Frigidaire,” Patchett said, “but I can’t live in a city that doesn’t have a bookstore.” Chapter 16 caught up with both Hayes and Patchett and talked with them by phone about their plans for Parnassus Books and about the story behind the store.

Giddy

Nashville writers react to the news that Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes are planning to open a new bookstore

By Margaret Renkl | June 13, 2011

June 13, 2011 When bestselling novelist Ann Patchett announced that she and a business partner, former Random House sales rep Karen Hayes, would soon be opening a new bookstore in Nashville, the city’s writers responded with joy:

Round Two

On the cusp of publishing his second book in a year, Adam Ross talks with Chapter 16 about women, men, and life since Mr. Peanut

By Margaret Renkl | June 9, 2011

June 9, 2011 Last June, Adam Ross’s debut novel, Mr. Peanut, inspired critical assessments like “ingenious,” “brilliant,” “riveting,” “audacious,” “arresting,” “forceful,” “involving,” “stirring,” “original,” “harrowing,” “bleakly convincing,” “unflinching,” and “mesmerizing.” A year later, the Nashville author is back with Ladies and Gentlemen, a new collection of short stories. Due on shelves June 28, it considers many of the same questions raised in Mr. Peanut: the human temptation to cruelty, the simultaneously redemptive and damning nature of passion, the difficulty in forging an integrated and identifiable self from disparate and sometimes self-contradictory impulses and desires. Today Ross offers Chapter 16 readers a sneak peak at the collection and answers questions about the book.