Chapter 16 - Part 281

Growing Up in Silence and Shame

Tayari Jones talks with Chapter 16 about the bigamous marriages at the heart of her acclaimed novel, Silver Sparrow

By Susannah Felts | January 10, 2017

In Silver Sparrow, the third novel by Tayari Jones, two girls born four months apart share a father who is secretly married to both of their mothers. Jones will read Silver Sparrow at the Camp House in Chattanooga on January 19 at 6 p.m. The event, part of Chattanooga State Community College’s Writers@Work initiative, is free and open to the public.

A Bookstore Phoenix?

The Booksellers at Laurelwood is closing, but hopes are high that another store will rise from its ashes

By Margaret Renkl | January 9, 2017

After thirty-two years in business, The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis has announced that it is closing. But readers in Memphis have good reason to hope the disaster can still be reversed.

Brand-New Bookstores

In East Nashville, Her Bookshop and Atomic Nashville offer two new buy-local options

By Susannah Felts | January 9, 2017

Quietly bucking the Online Behemoth That Shall Not Be Named, two new bookstores in East Nashville offer a quirky and beautiful array of books. Plus a shopping experience that’s personal, human, and as far from an algorithm as it can be.

One Big Story

Alan Lightman talks about his Memphis memoir, Screening Room

By Stephen Usery | January 6, 2017

In Screening Room, Alan Lightman—poet, novelist, and playwright—tells the story of his growing-up years in Memphis during the 1950s and ‘60s. The book centers on the family legacy of Lightman’s grandfather, a movie-palace magnate, but it is also wholly the story of Lightman himself as he struggles to understand his own place as a white, Jewish man in the segregated South.

Pulling the Curtain Back on Literary Wizardry

The burgeoning field of Cormac McCarthy scholarship offers surprising insights

By Ed Tarkington | January 5, 2017

To writers and scholars who have followed his career for decades, Cormac McCarthy is as notorious for his perceived reclusiveness as for his astonishing body of work. With Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King takes a deep dive into the McCarthy Archive at Texas State University and emerges with a lucid account of McCarthy’s transition from Tennessee to the Southwest.

Love and Money in Wartime

Lydia Peelle’s debut novel, The Midnight Cool, is a tale of two Tennessee horse traders during World War I

By Maria Browning | January 4, 2017

In Lydia Peelle’s debut novel, The Midnight Cool, a pair of itinerant horse traders is drawn into a web of mystery, love, and opportunity as WWI throws the country into turmoil. Peelle will read from the book at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 16, Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 21, and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 10. At each event, Peelle’s husband, Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, will perform music from the era.

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