Motherless Child
“A Haunting of My Own Name”
Damaged Goods
Both in and out of Place
The Best-Laid Plans
Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby
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The Meaning of Meme

Nashville novelist Ann Patchett reflects on what it’s like to be in “the cultural loop”

By Amaryllis Lyle |

March 4, 2013 Perhaps most celebrated for her novels, including the bestselling Bel Canto and State of Wonder, and for her independent book store, Parnassus Books in Nashville, Ann Patchett has recently enjoyed a morsel of fame on the HBO sitcom Girls. The show, well into its second season, makes a habit of aggressive name-dropping and has decided to bring Patchett into the spotlight.

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Responding to the Beauty of a Broken World

Terry Tempest Williams talks with Chapter 16 about her newest memoir

By Amaryllis Lyle |

February 28, 2013 Terry Tempest Williams was fifty-four years old when she began writing her newest memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, a book she began in response to her own mother’s death at age fifty-four. In it she tells the story of finding her mother’s journals—all blank—and contemplates the place of silence in a writer’s life. Williams will discuss When Women Were Birds at Parnassus Booksellers in Nashville on March 6 at 6:30 p.m.

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Life After Pi

Yann Martel talks with Chapter 16 about this year’s Nashville Reads pick

By Fernanda Moore |

February 26, 2013 Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, was a blockbuster in every sense of the word: it spent fifty-seven weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize as well as a host of other international literary prizes, was translated into forty languages, and has sold more than seven million copies. Martel will give a lecture at the Nashville Public Library on March 2 at 3 p.m. as the kickoff event for Nashville Reads, a partnership between the library, the office of Mayor Karl Dean, Humanities Tennessee, Parnassus Books, Friends of the Library, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the Nashville Public Library Foundation. Martel’s reading is the first event in a series of activities, including a screening of the film Life of Pi, in a citywide reading campaign that extends through April 13. The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are available in advance by clicking here.

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Reading City

Mayor Karl Dean is serious about getting Nashvillians to read—and talk about—great books

By Susannah Felts |

February 26, 2013 Last year saw the launch of the Nashville Reads program, which opened with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic work of dystopian literature. This year Life of Pi by Yann Martel has been named the city’s “one book” selection, and a season of discussions and events pegged to the book will kick off with a reading and signing by Martel at the Nashville Public Library on March 2 at 3 p.m. Prior to the event, Karl Dean, mayor of Nashville, answered questions from Chapter 16 about his hopes for the citywide reading initiative.

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Playing for Keeps

In a new book, Evan Thomas praises the gamesmanship of Dwight Eisenhower

By Chris Scott |

February 25, 2013 As bestselling author Evan Thomas recounts in Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, the thirty-fourth president was a master at both reading people and playing the odds, abilities that served him well whether at the bridge table or the negotiating table. Thomas argues that Ike bluffed his way through eight years of confrontation with the Russians and Chinese, preventing a war that he believed would leave civilization a smoldering heap. Thomas will appear with Jon Meacham to discuss Ike’s Bluff at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on February 28, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event is free and open to the public.

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Starring Gary Cooper

In a story discovered after his death, William Gay tells the tale of a good-hearted drifter who finds an unlikely landing place at the drive-in

By William Gay |

February 22, 2013 Novelist William Gay died suddenly on February 23, 2012, but he left behind a body of work that will surely long outlive all of us who loved him and loved the work he did, in near isolation, from his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee. “William Gay was born a writer,” Chapter 16’s Serenity Gerbman wrote at the time. “As a late-life literary success who didn’t attend creative-writing programs or pay for professional workshops, Gay symbolized the hopes of struggling writers, especially rural ones. He was good, and he found a way to let the world know he was good—those are facts we cling to as evidence of what is possible. Throughout history, people have made long pilgrimages to witness lesser miracles.” To commemorate the anniversary of Gay’s death, Chapter 16 is proud to publish a new story that Gay’s family found among his papers. The story was discovered in manuscript form and is faithfully reproduced here without significant editing.

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