Chapter 16 - Part 454

Tiny Dreams

To learn to soar, sometimes all it takes is a hero

By Sean Kinch | November 5, 2012

November 5, 2012 While my friends played Nerf football in the street or debated Big Ten versus Southwest Conference defenses, I’d bike over to Gullett Elementary with my junior-sized basketballs and spend afternoons on the school’s asphalt courts accompanied only by the imaginative projections of my heroes. No one witnessed the games, but I never felt alone—not with the Phoenix Suns’ Walter Davis on my wing and Alvan Adams on the block, not playing defense against Havlicek’s Celtics or trying to match the ball-handling panache of the Knicks’ Walt Frazier. I’d check the box scores for my heroes—guys like David Thompson or Rick Barry—and then re-create their statistics, making the same number of field goals and free throws, high-fiving teammates when the game was complete.

New Book from Falconer

Blas Falconer releases second poetry collection The Foundling Wheel

By Emily Choate | November 2, 2012

November 2, 2012 Four Way Books has released a new collection of poems from Blas Falconer, Coordinator for the Creative Writing Program at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. The Foundling Wheel is the second collection from Falconer, who has received an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant.

“Palliation”

By Hadley Hury | November 2, 2012

November 2, 2012 Hadley Hury recently retired as college counselor and chair of the department of English at Hutchison School in Memphis; for ten years he also was film critic at the Memphis Flyer. Hury’s 2003 novel, The Edge of the Gulf, received strong national reviews; he followed it with a collection of stories, It’s Not the Heat, in 2007. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous magazines, reviews, and journals including Image, The James Dickey Review, Green Mountains Review, Colorado Review, and Appalachian Heritage, among others. He and his wife live in Rugby, Tennessee.

Love and Other Art Forms

Veronica Kavass talks with Chapter 16 about the provocative relationship between love and art

By Melinda Baker | November 1, 2012

November 1, 2012 From Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the twenty-nine stories in Artists in Love range from affirmations of enduring love and artistic collaboration to Shakespearean-esque tragedy. But as author Veronica Kavass demonstrates, inspired works of art were conceived no matter the arc of the love story, and many are beautifully displayed throughout her new book alongside intriguing photographs of the artist-couples. Kavass will discuss Artists in Love on November 11 at 2 p.m. at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

Maraniss Heading to Vanderbilt

David Maraniss will teach at Vanderbilt University during the spring 2013 semester

By Emily Choate | October 30, 2012

October 30, 2012

Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss has been named Writer in Residence at the Martha Rivers Ingram Commons and the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Maraniss will co-teach two courses, Presidential Biographies and Reading and Writing about Sports in American Life. In a Vanderbilt press release, Maraniss says, “I’ll be focusing on subjects that obsess me—the art of biography, presidential politics and the sociology of sports.”

In Thrall to What’s Between the Margins

Short-story master Lee K. Abbott talks with Chapter 16 about an entire career spent reading, writing, and teaching

By Pablo Tanguay | October 30, 2012

October 30, 2012 Between the 1980 publication of his first story collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, and the 2006 publication of his most recent, All Things, All at Once, Lee K. Abbott wrote some of the best short stories of his generation—hell, some of the best short stories of anybody’s generation. Set in the American Southwest and featuring a cast of male narrators who are both loquacious and vital, Abbott’s full-blooded tales earned the highest praise even as their style ran counter to the era’s minimalist chic. By the end of the century, Abbott—who recently retired from the M.F.A. program at Ohio State University, where he was a professor—was widely acknowledged as a master of the short story form. Lee K. Abbot will appear at two events this week at the University of Memphis. As part of the River City Writers’ Series, Abbott will read from his work October 30 at 8 p.m. in the University Center, Room 300 (River Room). A book signing will follow. He will hold an interview with students October 31 at 10:30 a.m. in Patterson Hall, Room 456. Both events are free and open to the public.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher