Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Something Curious to Write About

A revealing one-sided correspondence is at the heart of Dear Hank Williams by Kimberly Willis Holt

April 16, 2015 In Dear Hank Williams, National Book Award-winning children’s author Kimberly Willis Holt tells the story of an eleven-year-old in 1940s Louisiana through letters the girl writes to Hank Williams. Holt will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on April 22 at 6:30 p.m.

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Tax Fraud

The Patriot Threat, Steve Berry’s new thriller, ponders what it would mean if the federal income tax had never been properly ratified

April 15, 2015 In The Patriot Threat, Steve Berry’s latest thriller, Cotton Malone searches for evidence that the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been illegal from its inception—and that for more than a hundred years all federal income tax has been collected fraudulently. Berry will appear at the Nashville Public Library on April 22, 2015, at 6:15 p.m. as part of the Salon@615 series.

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Running Out of Truth

In What Comes Next and How to Like It, memoirist Abigail Thomas explores betrayal and loss and other parts of life that cannot be understood at a remove

April 14, 2015 What Comes Next and How to Like It, Abigail Thomas’s newest memoir, both exemplifies and transcends its genre as Thomas meditates on what it means to edit life down to essentials: love, forgiveness, pleasure, and letting go. Thomas will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 21, 2015, at 6:30 p.m

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Hidden Treasure, a Haunted House, and an Unlikely Trio of Detectives

In this debut novel, a boy braves bullies and worse to try to save his family home

April 13, 2015 In Matthew Baker’s debut middle-grade novel, If You Find This, eleven-year-old Nicholas breaks his grandfather out of a nursing home and enlists the aid of two unlikely allies to find the family heirlooms his grandfather insists he hid years earlier—all to keep his parents from having to sell their family home. Baker will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 17, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.; and again in Furman Hall, Room 114, at Vanderbilt University on April 20, 2015, at 7 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.

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L.A. Dark

In Sweet Nothing, mystery writer Richard Lange draws terse poetry from the lives of downtrodden Angelinos

April 10, 2015 Recovering drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, teenage mothers of teenage mothers, alcoholic philanderers—these are Richard Lange’s people. In his new collection, Sweet Nothing, Lange improbably draws elegant poetry and tragic, lingering beauty out of the thwarted, misbegotten denizens of twenty-first century Los Angeles. He will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis at 6:30 p.m. on April 17, 2015.

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Shake It Off

In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson peers into the Internet abyss and challenges haters not to hate

April 8, 2015Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examines the consequences—intended and otherwise—of public shaming via the Internet. The book features interviews with otherwise ordinary people made infamous by relatively harmless missteps gone viral. Ronson will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 14, 2015, at 6:30 p.m.

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