Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

At the Top of His Game

With End of Watch, Stephen King combines detective fiction and the supernatural suspense of his early career

June 6, 2016 With End of Watch, Stephen King combines detective fiction and the supernatural suspense of his early career to great effect in the forms of mind control, body-swapping, and telekinesis, a la Carrie and Firestarter. King will discuss End of Watch at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on June 11, 2016, at 8 p.m.

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In a Dark Wood

Novelist Adam Ross first opened the closet of adult secrets through the plays of Tennessee Williams, who won a Pulitzer Prize for both A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

June 3, 2016 In the fourth of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, novelist Adam Ross considers the lasting legacy of Tennessee Williams’s two Pulitzer-winning plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

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The Birth of Black Power

Historian Aram Goudsouzian talks with Chapter 16 about the fiftieth anniversary of James Meredith’s March Against Fear

June 2, 2016 As Aram Goudsouzian recounts in his book Down to the Crossroads, the Meredith March Against Fear represented a crucial turning point in civil-rights history. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the march, Goudsouzian will discuss Down to the Crossroads at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on June 9, 2016, at 6 p.m.

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Garden of Life

The poems in Linda Parsons’s This Shaky Earth whisper elusive truths of the heart

June 1, 2016 The poems in Linda Parsons’s This Shaky Earth take their material from the prosaic and the deeply personal, but there’s nothing narrow about them. Rich with all the mystery and complexity of human feeling, they often depict the pleasures of home darkened by troubled memories. Parsons will discuss This Shaky Earth at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 5, 2016, at 2 p.m.

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Vive la Résistance!

French patriots fight Nazi occupation in Alan Furst’s new spy thriller

May 31, 2016 Alan Furst’s new novel, A Hero of France, portrays the dangers faced by the brave souls who elected to fight the Nazi occupation of France from the inside, where enemies were many and friends could not always be trusted. Furst will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on June 6, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

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Home Country

Novelist Amy Greene reflects on James Agee’s effort in A Death in the Family to tell something true in fiction

May 27, 2016 In the third of a nine-essay series commemorating the centennial year of the Pulitzer Prizes, novelist Amy Greene reflects on the lasting legacy of James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958, three years after Agee’s own death.

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