Chapter 16 - Part 478

Dirty Boys

Adam Prince explores the male psyche in his haunting collection, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men

By Michael Ray Taylor | May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012 With his debut story collection, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, Knoxville resident Adam Prince joins ranks with Norman Mailer, Harry Crews, George Singleton, and other writers who explore the darker side of American maleness. Prince and his wife, Charlotte Pence, will read from their new books on May 19 at Union Avenue Books in Knoxville. The event begins at 2 p.m.

“The Branches, the Axe, the Missing”

By Charlotte Pence | May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012 Charlotte Pence is a poet and critic who recently received her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Tennessee. A regular Chapter 16 contributor, she is also the author of two award-winning chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Her work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations, the Discovered Voices award, and a fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. It has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Tar River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals. Pence and her husband, Adam Prince, will read from their new books on May 19 at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville. The event begins at 2 p.m.

In Residence

University of Tennessee Libraries names Christopher Hebert the new Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence

By Margaret Renkl | May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012 Knoxville is a city that treasures its writers: both local newspapers—the Knoxville News Sentinel and Metro Pulse—routinely cover books and author events; its independent bookstore, Union Ave. Books, hosts frequent readings and book-club meetings; the public library sponsors a world-class Children’s Festival of Reading each year; and the University of Tennessee, which boasts a “Writers in the Library” program and a creative-writing department, has a Ph.D. program in writing that’s ranked fifth in the entire nation for funding. In other words, novelist Christopher Hebert landed in a good town.

Astronomical Adventure

Andrea Wulf captures the danger and daring of an eighteenth-century scientific quest

By Michael Ray Taylor | May 17, 2012

May 17, 2012 In a book that is part scientific history (in the mode of Holly Tucker’s Blood Work) and part international quest (a la National Treasure or The DaVinci Code), Andrea Wulf circumnavigates the globe with a story of Enlightenment-era derring-do. Wulf will read from and discuss Chasing Venus at the Nashville Public Library on May 24, as part of the Salon@615 series. The event will begin with a reception at 6:15 p.m., followed by a reading at 6:45. Both are free and open to the public.

(Not) Between the Sheets

On book tour for Between Shades of Gray, YA novelist Ruta Sepetys is attracting some bewildered guests

By Margaret Renkl | May 17, 2012

May 17, 2012 Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on whether you’re referring to literary artistry or raw book sales—Between Shades of Gray by Nashville novelist Ruta Sepetys is frequently being confused with a novel by a similar name: Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both authors are on book tour this spring. Sepety’s book is a YA novel about a young girl’s incarceration in Stalin’s death camps. James’s is about… something else.

Where the Wild Things Are

In connection with a show at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Mark W. Scala considers the unsettling side of human imagination

By Michael Sims | May 14, 2012

May 14, 2012 Mark W. Scala’s Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, a beautiful catalog for an art exhibition, is both invigorating and disturbing. It’s invigorating because it isn’t another business-as-usual record of a museum playing it safe with crowd-pleasers like the Impressionists but rather a lively demonstration of a museum engaged with the primordial dark side of the human psyche. It’s disturbing for the same reason, and it’s meant to be. “Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination” runs through May 28 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.

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