Chapter 16 - Part 480

Every Picture Tells a Story

William B. Jones Jr. presents the second edition of his exhaustive history of Classics Illustrated

By Tina LoTufo | January 10, 2012

January 10, 2012 The publication of the first edition of Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History in 2001 was met with great appreciation among fans of mid-century comic books and comic-book artists. In the second edition, William B. Jones Jr. has incuded more than a hundred additional pages of historical facts, interviews, photos, and illustrations from the original comics, including full-color plates of iconic covers in the series. Jones calls them “as much a part of growing up in postwar America as baseball cards, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, or rock ‘n’ roll.”

Without a Literary Blueprint

Madison Smartt Bell remembers his early days in New York City

By Margaret Renkl | January 10, 2012

January 10, 2012 “I arrived in New York in 1979, without a literary blueprint,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in a new essay for The Millions. “I was a Southern boy, from rural Middle Tennessee (okay, by way of Princeton, I admit). My favorite writers at that time were Dostoevsky and Harry Crews. I didn’t know that a contemporary urban fiction existed.”

A Remarkable Life

Robert K. Massie’s biography shows the human side of Catherine the Great, Russia’s brilliant eighteenth-century monarch

By Fernanda Moore | January 9, 2012

January 9, 2012 In his new biography, Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman, Robert K. Massie (author of the bestselling Nicholas and Alexandra and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter the Great) follows the legendary Russian monarch’s splendid trajectory from powerless teenage girl to brilliant ruler. Massie, a former Nashville resident, recently spoke by phone with Chapter 16 about Catherine’s fascinating life—and even more fascinating character—prior to his Nashville appearance as part of the Salon@615 series. Massie will discuss Catherine the Great on January 15 at the Nashville Public Library. The event will begin with a reception at 2:15 p.m., followed by the author talk at 3. Both are free and open to the public.

“This Brilliant Light Around the Corner”

Poets and writers around the country consider the poetic legacy of Eleanor Ross Taylor, who died last weekend at age ninety-one

By Margaret Renkl | January 6, 2012

January 6, 2012 In honor of the achievements of Eleanor Ross Taylor, and to mark her passing last Friday, Chapter 16 contacted poets and novelists around the country to ask for their impressions of a writer who spent much of her literary life in the shadow of her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Peter Taylor, but who quietly continued her own work with passion and dedication during their fifty-one years together—and for more than a decade beyond his death. Through the comments of Betty Adcock, Richard Bausch, Claudia Emerson, Mark Jarman, Don Share, Dave Smith, and R.T. Smith, what emerges is a collaborative portrait of a woman who was quiet, modest, and gentle but whose poems were uncompromising, sharp, and (in a word that comes up again and again) fierce.

Savage Lunacy, Comical Rage

Wells Tower talks with Chapter 16 about the tensions between fiction and journalism, his recent collaboration with painter John Currin, and his real opinion of chitlins

By Ed Tarkington | January 5, 2012

January 5, 2012 In 2009, Wells Tower exploded onto the American literary landscape with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, one of the most widely acclaimed debut short-story collections in recent memory. With quirky characters ranging from downtrodden real-estate speculators and Gulf Coast aquarium enthusiasts to lovelorn carnival hands and pillaging medieval Vikings, Everything Ravaged dazzles with the delightful oddity of its settings and especially with Tower’s relentlessly inventive prose. His most recent work includes a series of scathingly satirical short-short stories written for a new coffee-table book of paintings by John Currin. Wells Tower will read from his work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 12, 2012.

"A Refreshingly Honest Story"

Buzz is building for a new children’s book by Silas House and Neela Vaswani

By Margaret Renkl | January 5, 2012

January 5, 2012 Former Harrogate poet and novelist Silas House tends to be published by small literary presses without a huge budget for marketing, but his books always seem to find their way into the national spotlight anyway. Consider what Publisher’s Weekly has to say–in a starred review, no less–about Same Sun Here, the new middle-grade novel by House and his coauthor, Neela Vaswani:

Distant Sons

Tim Johnston
Algonquin Books
400 pages
$29

“Tim Johnston has once again raised the bar for the literary thriller. Distant Sons is elegant and edgy, refined and complex. It excavates the truth from the darkest recesses of the past and shines a light towards the possibility of a redemptive future.”

~ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women and Sing Her Down