Chapter 16 - Part 3

Deconstructing a Dog

Bronwen Dickey talks with Chapter 16 about Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

By Maria Browning | May 27, 2022

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Whether you’re the adoring owner of a pittie or a person who thinks pit-bull bans make perfect sense, you are likely to find some of your assumptions overturned by Bronwen Dickey’s Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. Dickey sifts through a great deal of history, science, and popular culture to uncover the truth about the dogs and the source of our extreme ideas about them.

The Glorious Pastime: Anjali Enjeti

Anjali Enjeti on the books that inspire her

By Maria Browning | April 26, 2022

The Parted Earth, Enjeti’s debut novel, tells a story shaped by the sectarian violence of India’s 1947 partition, following the legacy of that trauma from the streets of New Delhi to 21st-century Atlanta. To mark the book’s paperback release this month, Chapter 16 asked Enjeti to share some of her favorite books and authors via our Glorious Pastime questionnaire.

The Glorious Pastime: Mary Laura Philpott

Mary Laura Philpott loves sad books … and happy ones

By Maria Browning | March 3, 2022

Mary Laura Philpott’s forthcoming book, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives, due in April, has been named among the most anticipated releases of 2022, and Parnassus Books will host a launch party for Bomb Shelter at the Hilton Green Hills in Nashville on April 10. Today, Philpott answers our Glorious Pastime questionnaire.

The Third Pillar of the Community

Leigh Ann Gardner documents Tennessee’s African American lodges and cemeteries

By Maria Browning | February 24, 2022

Leigh Ann Gardner talks with Chapter 16 about her book To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead, which delves into the history of Tennessee’s African American lodges and offers an illustrated survey of surviving lodge cemeteries across the state.

“The Voice Is My Key”

Playwright and poet Dan O’Brien searches for meaning in the chaos of trauma

By Maria Browning | November 12, 2021

Dan O’Brien’s A Story That Happens, a collection of essays originally delivered as craft lectures at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, weaves observations on the art of playwriting with deeply personal memoir.

Engaging Ontogeny—and Animal Sex

Michael Sims discusses biological and literary creativity

By Maria Browning | July 2, 2021

From the Chapter 16 archive: Where do babies come from? It may be a child’s question, but the answer is far from simple, especially if we consider the baby-making processes of the whole animal kingdom, as Michael Sims does in his companion to the National Geographic Channel’s television special of the same name, In the Womb: Animals. It features ultrasound images of fetal animals that are so detailed and vivid it’s almost hard to believe they aren’t simulations.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses