Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Sewing Up Another Mystery in South Carolina

Elizabeth Lynn Casey takes her latest Southern Sewing Circle mystery to the movies

April 2, 2012 In Reap What You Sew, her sixth Southern Sewing Circle mystery, Elizabeth Lynn Casey returns to Sweet Briar, South Carolina, where Tori Sinclair has her dream job as the director of the town’s library, is engaged to a handsome and kind schoolteacher, and—perhaps most important—is now firmly ensconced in the town’s sewing circle, which has become family to her. But then a murder occurs, and Tori’s new friends are implicated. The result is a classic Casey cozy. To celebrate the fourth anniversary of Mysteries & More in Nashville, Elizabeth Lynn Casey will discuss and sign copies of Reap What You Sew on April 7 at 2 p.m.

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Twenty Million and Counting

Karen Kingsbury talks with Chapter 16 about Loving, the concluding novel in her wildly popular Bailey Flanigan series

March 30, 2012 Nashville novelist Karen Kingsbury has more than twenty million books in print and boasts a quarter of a million Facebook fans who look forward to the latest installment in her series fiction, stand-alone titles, and children’s books. Kingsbury’s newest offering, Loving, is the fourth and final book in the Bailey Flanigan series. She recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.

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Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, Celebrated by an Entire Homeland

The honors just keep coming for Ruta Sepetys and Between Shades of Gray

March 30, 2012 Between Shades of Gray, the bestselling debut young-adult novel by Nashvillian Ruta Sepetys, has already won the Golden Kite Award (an honor by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Prix RTL-Lire (a French prize for the best novel for young people). It was also a finalist for the American Library Association’s William C. Morris Award. Now Shades of Gray has been shortlisted for a prestigious Carnegie Medal, and Sepetys has been honored with Lithuania’s Patriot Award.

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The Weird Sister

Jake Bohstedt Morrill’s epistolary fable probes the darker side of sibling rivalry

March 29, 2012 Jake Bohstedt Morrill, a Unitarian minister in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard Divinity School. His debut novel, Randy Bradley—a tiny hardcover volume very reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library—is an off-kilter narrative constructed around a massive, mysterious squabble between two sisters. Morrill recently spoke with Chapter 16 about literature, postmodernism, and why he’s drawn to aggrieved characters.

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Showing Up for Life

In a new memoir, Margaret Overton describes her journey from divorce and disease to clarity and compassion

March 28, 2012 “On Memorial Day 2002 I woke up and decided to leave my husband,” begins Margaret Overton’s memoir, Good in a Crisis. Her husband of twenty years, a surgeon, does not object to the divorce as it gives him more time to spend with his young girlfriend. As if this situation were not stressful enough, Overton, a Chicago anesthesiologist with two teenaged daughters, suffers a brain aneurysm a few months later. Good in a Crisis is the story of how she survives the dissolution of her marriage and a life-threatening illness at the same time—with the help of her family and friends and a healthy sense of humor—and all the lessons she learns (mostly the hard way) in the process. Margaret Overton will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 4 at 6:30 p.m.

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A Drifter’s Story

Chapter 16 talks with biographer Diane Diekman about the great Marty Robbins

March 26, 2012 When he was a young singer, they called him “the boy with the teardrop in his voice.” Two decades later, as the Grand Ole Opry moved from the Ryman to its new home at Opryland, Marty Robbins was the last artist on the old stage and the first to perform on the new. In her latest biography, Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins, Diane Diekman provides a remarkably detailed narrative account of one of country music’s most beloved figures. Diekman will discuss and sign her book at 12:30 p.m. on March 31 at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. She answered questions from Chapter 16 via email in advance of her appearance.

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