Chapter 16 - Part 370

Priceless Peer

In a new biography of Ralph Peer, Barry Mazor untangles the roots of American roots music

By Steve Haruch | December 3, 2014

December 3, 2014 Barry Mazor’s Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music traces the life and career of Ralph Peer, who rose from Kansas City phonograph salesman to one of history’s most influential A&R scouts, record producers, and music publishers. From the birth of what came to be known as country music to the popularization of blues, regional, and eventually Latin music, Mazor tracks it all.

Dispatches from the Default Period

In Richard Ford’s new volume of novellas, Let Me Be Frank With You, Frank Bascombe returns to reflect on life’s final act

By Ed Tarkington | December 2, 2014

December 2, 2014 Despite a body of work that traverses a broad landscape of American character and experience, Richard Ford will always be recognized first as the creator of Frank Bascombe, American Everyman. Bascombe returns in Let Me Be Frank With You, a series of spare, ruminative tales of quiet longing in New Jersey in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Richard Ford will appear on December 10, 2014, at 6:15 p.m. at the Nashville Public Library. The event, part of the Salon@615 series, is free and open to the public.

Farm to Table—to Bookstore

Chapter 16 talks with celebrated chef Sean Brock about his new cookbook, Heritage

By Nicki Pendleton Wood | December 1, 2014

December 1, 2014 Sean Brock used to swear he’d never write a book. The acclaimed chef and owner of Husk was too busy making food the farm-to-table way, relying on improvisation and in-season ingredients. Nevertheless, Brock has now released a cookbook titled Heritage, and it’s a big book, too: a foot tall and 334 pages long. He will discuss Heritage at POP Nashville on December 3, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

Killer Aim

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta is back in Patricia Cornwell’s newest novel, Flesh and Blood

By Sarah Norris | November 25, 2014

November 25, 2014 Flesh and Blood is Patricia Cornwell’s twenty-second novel featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Since the series began, with the 1990 publication of Postmortem, Cornwell’s books have sold more than 100 million copies in 120 countries, and fans will be glad to know that Flesh and Blood includes the same core cast of characters they have come to know and love.

Untamed Narratives

In Short Stories by Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine revisits the parables with an eye toward their first-century context

By Beth Waltemath | November 24, 2014

November 24, 2014 Short Stories by Jesus, the latest book by Vanderbilt professor Amy-Jill Levine, analyzes a misunderstood and nearly forgotten literary form: the parable. Levine, a professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt, argues that Jesus’s parables have been domesticated into easy lessons, robbed of their power to surprise, subvert, and indict.

Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge

November 23, 2014

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning