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Chapter 16
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The Farthest Reaches of the Most Isolated Place in the World

By Stephen Usery |

April 19, 2013 This week novelist Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—a prize no novelist took home in 2012—for The Orphan Master’s Son, which was released to wide critical acclaim in January of last year. Johnson is also the author of a story collection, Emporium (2002), and another novel, Parasites Like Us (2003). Today he speaks with Chapter 16‘s Stephen Usery about The Orphan Master’s Son, the story of a North Korean boy living in a Soviet-built and now largely lawless city far from the nation’s center of power in Pyongyang.

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Living by Stories

Novelist Richard Bausch teaches his writing students patience, toughness, and the willingness to fail

By Richard Bausch |

April 18, 2013 A Celebration of Southern Literature, the biennial gathering of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, begins today in Chattanooga and will run though April 20. Novelist Richard Bausch, a member of the Fellowship and a legendary writing teacher, is beloved in the literary community for his Facebook posts that spur and encourage and guide aspiring writers. In conjunction with the Chattanooga celebration, he has kindly permitted Chapter 16 to repost a selection of his Facebook updates.

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Tough Love

Inman Majors talks about his latest novel, Love’s Winning Plays, the subtlety of satire, the mechanization of modern college football, and the toughness of coaches’ wives

By Bradley Hartsell |

April 18, 2013 As a child of the Majors football dynasty in Tennessee, Inman Majors grew up loving the sport and absorbing all the stories that come from a family with tales worth hearing a few times over. So perhaps it’s no surprise that one day he would have no choice but to write about it. Prior to his free public reading on April 25 at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy, Majors talks with Chapter 16 about his comic novel, Love’s Winning Plays.

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On the Origins of Ecology

James B. Hunt details the development of John Muir’s environmental thought

By Ralph Bowden |

April 17, 2013 John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, set out on a walk from Indiana to the Gulf in the fall of 1867. In Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68 historian James B. Hunt traces that walk through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. At the time, Muir was already a serious student of botany with a powerful calling to observe and collect species, especially in regions unfamiliar to him, but his thinking about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature was not yet completely formed. Hunt will discuss Restless Fires at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on April 24 at 6 p.m.

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The Persistence of Memory

John Boyne re-imagines the last days of the Romanovs

By Tina LoTufo |

April 16, 2013 When Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev impulsively steps in front of a bullet meant for the Tsar’s cousin, he is rewarded by being whisked from his miserable existence in the squalid village of Kashin to the glorious Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II during the last days of the centuries-old Romanov dynasty. John Boyne will discuss The House of Special Purpose—a novel of love, regret, and nearly unbearable loss—at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 24 at 6:30 p.m.

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Immortality and Lemonade

By Stephen Usery |

April 15, 2013 Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (a year in which no prize was awarded), talks with Chapter 16 about her new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. In her fiction, Russell toys with the line between fantasy and reality, and she is wary of fantasy’s association with young-adult novels.

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