A family’s storytelling tradition hides and reveals a history of domestic abuse
The Crocodile Bride, the debut novel by Ashleigh Bell Pedersen, is a gripping family saga about the power of storytelling — especially its ability to warm and soften the edges of cold, harsh reality. Pedersen creates a world at once tragic and beautiful, violent and magical, desperately impoverished yet rich in meaning.
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Gordon Van Ness discusses the complex legacy of poet James Dickey
In James Dickey: A Literary Life, Gordon Van Ness, a long-time scholar of the Vanderbilt-educated poet and novelist, has written a comprehensive biography of a complex man and his place in American letters.
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Book Excerpt: The Heart as Framed
The Heart as Framed is Richard Jackson’s 16th book of poetry. Since 1976, he has been teaching at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he directs the Meacham Writers’ Workshop.
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Emily Bingham exposes the tortuous, white supremacist history behind a familiar song
In My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, Emily Bingham reveals the strange career of revisions, evasions, lies, mythmaking, and forgetting behind Stephen Foster’s iconic ballad.
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Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House multiplies the world of A Visit from the Goon Squad
In The Candy House, Jennifer Egan revisits characters she created in A Visit to the Goon Squad. Now they confront a techno-capitalist future in which consumers allow their minds to be accessed. Egan will discuss The Candy House at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 4.
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Anjali Enjeti on the books that inspire her
The Parted Earth, Enjeti’s debut novel, tells a story shaped by the sectarian violence of India’s 1947 partition, following the legacy of that trauma from the streets of New Delhi to 21st-century Atlanta. To mark the book’s paperback release this month, Chapter 16 asked Enjeti to share some of her favorite books and authors via our Glorious Pastime questionnaire.
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