Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Tina Chambers

Good Fortune

It was a weirdly specific message to get from a cookie

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Divorce is an ugly business — at least it was for me. I felt as though everything in my life was broken: my home, my family, even my sanity. I didn’t know it then, but far from being over, my life was about to get interesting.

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The Safest Place in the World

Alan Gratz’s new novel for young readers explores the events of December 7, 1941

“I was afraid. Of pretty much everything. There were a hundred ways to die at Pearl Harbor,” admits 13-year-old Frank, the main character and narrator of Heroes: A Novel of Pearl Harbor, the latest in Alan Gratz’s series of action-packed historical novels for young readers. Gratz will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 25. 

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Loving the Ways You’ve Changed

The ups and downs of 40+ years in a same-sex relationship

In The Way from Me to Us, Mike Coleman recounts his challenges and personal growth as a gay man, both in his early life and through more than 40 years with his husband.

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Blazing the Trail

The story of the TSU Tigerbelles’ triumph over discrimination

Aime Alley Card’s extraordinary book, The Tigerbelles: Olympic Legends from Tennessee State, describes the women’s track and field program at Tennessee State University from its humble beginnings to the triumphant performance of Wilma Rudolph and her teammates at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Card will discuss The Tigerbelles at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 3.

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A Book About Now

Sharon Cameron’s latest YA novel explores the difference between art and artifice

For Artifice, her third young adult novel set during World War II, Nashville author Sharon Cameron paints a colorful and suspenseful thriller inspired by historical heroes and villains living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Cameron will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on November 7.

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The Wonderful Inseparability of Form and Content

Oxford scholar Emma Smith on the cultural history of the book

Emma Smith’s Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers is a critical look at books as objects and the ways they have been bought and sold, used and abused, feared and celebrated, reviled and fetishized, bound, banned, and burned throughout history. Smith will deliver the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment Lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis on October 19.

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