April 4, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. died on April 4, 1968, when a single shot fired from a flophouse across the street felled him as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Writer Hampton Sides was six years old when King was murdered, a story he tells in his recent book of narrative nonfiction, Hellhound on His Trail.
March 30, 2011 When Dolen Perkins-Valdez was young woman, she had no use for the real housewives of Memphis, Tennessee. In a new essay for Black voices, she writes, “When I was younger, in moments of my most impertinent, most naive arrogance, I wondered why my extraordinarily intelligent mother decided to become a housewife. Why didn’t she do more with her great gifts? It was Alice Walker’s groundbreaking 1974 essay ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’ that matured me on this subject.
March 29, 2011 In a bookstore, scale matters. Educated staff matter. Community matters. A bookstore is not simply a place to buy books; it’s also a place to find kindred souls. If you already know what you want to read, Amazon is almost impossible to resist. Buying a book online is easy, it’s fast, and it’s usually cheaper than the book in the store. But it’s also a lonesome experience. You run into none of those passionate readers who can be counted on to press a much-loved book into the hands of that stranger standing before the shelf, wavering. At Amazon, you gain nothing from the experience of veteran booksellers, who can tell you with confidence, “Michiko totally blew this one.” Buying a book online is effortless, but if you need a book that will change your life, Amazon can’t help you. No search field is built to answer the question, “What book will articulate these inchoate fears keeping me awake at three a.m.?”
March 29, 2011 According to an interview in The Atlantic, Holly Tucker got the idea for her new book of nonfiction, Blood Work, when she heard then-President George W. Bush defend his position on stem-cell research by citing a fear of any scientific studies that might result in “human-animal hybrids”:
After that speech, I was struck, dumbfounded actually, how the arguments and reactions on the Internet and in the media mirrored those that I was seeing in the early blood transfusion trials, where the donors were animals.
March 25, 2011 Ann Patchett spent twelve years as a student at St. Bernard Academy, a Catholic school in Nashville run by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Mercy. (The school now ends after 8th grade, but during Patchett’s youth, the St. Bernard campus housed an all-girls high school, as well). One of the nuns there is the subject of Patchett’s new essay in the British journal Granta. The piece is not available online, but Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan describes it as “a moving essay …
March 22, 2011 Last month, Chapter 16 published an interview with Madison Smartt Bell and an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, The Color of Night. Now Bell gives a reading from the book in BOMB Magazine‘s series, “Fiction for Driving Across America.” Download the podcast here.
