Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Maria Browning

Bringing People into the Room

Francesca T. Royster’s Black Country Music challenges boundaries

Francesca T. Royster’s Black Country Music weaves history, criticism, and memoir into an elegant narrative that challenges assumptions about what country music can be. Royster will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

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The Story Beneath the Sprawl

Mastodons to Mississippians explores ancient Nashville

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Mastodons to Mississipians: Adventures in Nashville’s Deep Past, Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres offer a brief, fascinating survey of the Nashville region’s rich archaeological record and a primer on the human communities that thrived there thousands of years before Timothy Demonbreun arrived. The book is also a plea for preservation of sites under threat from the city’s raging development boom, as well as a sobering acknowledgment of what has already been lost. Aaron Deter-Wolf and Tanya M. Peres will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

 
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Deconstructing a Dog

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

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. 

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The Glorious Pastime: Anjali Enjeti

Anjali Enjeti on the books that inspire her

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.

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The Glorious Pastime: Mary Laura Philpott

Mary Laura Philpott loves sad books … and happy ones

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. 

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The Third Pillar of the Community

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

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.

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