Chapter 16 - Part 354

An Insignificant Balcony

Perhaps history is anything that is found in the past and repeated in the future

By Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay | April 20, 2015

April 20, 2015 The steps to our little balcony seem narrower each time, my hands tracing the delicate staircase. I forget the feeling of cool metal under my fingertips and dust that covers every millimeter of space until I have made it to the top, realizing what I’ve missed all along. There stand my grandparents in the doorframe with stolen time in their skin and longing in their veins.

Growing Home

An only child contemplates her unlikely path to motherhood

By Jen Wallwork Dominguez | April 20, 2015

April 20, 2015 My parents entered into marriage under the duress of an unplanned pregnancy, and spent the next nine brutal years locked up together, punishing each other for the mistake. By the time I graduated high school I had decided that I would never have children.

Enough Light to Prove the World Exists

In Crimes Against Birds, Denton Loving tends the landscapes, and dreamscapes, of Appalachia

By Emily Choate | April 17, 2015

April 17, 2015 In Denton Loving’s debut poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds, the rhythms of the waking world and the dream world hold equal power. Set among the narrow mountain roads, apple orchards, and cattle pastures of southern Appalachia, these poems push beyond bucolic portraits of nature. They ask us to wake up even as we descend into dreams.

Something Curious to Write About

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

By Tracy Barrett | April 16, 2015

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.

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

By Kathryn Justice Leache | April 15, 2015

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.

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

By Beth Waltemath | April 14, 2015

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

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher