January 24, 2011 In the February/March issue of BookForum, author and Chapter 16 contributor Clay Risen reviews a new book by video-game designer Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken examines the goals and effectiveness of a unique New York City charter school called Quest to Learn, where students tackle assignments designed to mimic the experience of playing a video game.
January 23, 2011 Kate Daniels’s poem “Disjunction” appears in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Disjunction,” which was included in the 1998 collection, Four Testimonies, begins,
On my knees in my office,
leaning over the metal can
of waste, I squeeze my breasts
to express the milk that’s accrued
in my graduate seminar on postmodern
January 20, 2011 The Morning News has entered Amy Greene’s debut novel Bloodroot in its Seventh Annual Tournament of Books. The competition, which pits sixteen of the most critically acclaimed novels of the previous year against each other in a seeded bracket, doesn’t kick off until March 7. The news today “will allow time for Tournament fans to begin reading so they can follow along with the blood sport,” notes the press release.
January 17, 2011 Chattanooga native Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of Andrew Jackson, knows his way around a gun cabinet, according to an editorial Meacham delivered last Friday night on the PBS program Need to Know, which he co-hosts: “My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10. I have inherited many of my family’s guns, including a rifle made by my great, great, great grandfather, which I will preserve and give to my son.
January 17, 2011 The most recent book by Memphis native Hampton Sides is a nonfiction story that reads like a novel. As the author of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, Sides spent years considering the psyche of the kind of angry, unbalanced man who might aim a gun at a civic leader. Sides sees a lot of James Earl Ray in Jared Loughner, the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Richards outside a Tuscon grocery store:
January 13, 2011 Debut novelist Ruta Sepetys has pulled off a hat trick with her YA novel, Shades of Gray: starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews. A historical novel set in Russia during Stalin’s reign of terror, the book addresses “a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction,” according to Kirkus.
