Chapter 16 - Part 500

“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:

The Triumph of Rationality

Michael Sims introduces a fascinating cast of Victorian detectives—both real and imagined

By Tina LoTufo | January 4, 2012

January 4, 2012 Michael Sims’s new collection of Victorian detective stories, The Dead Witness, is a cornucopia of dastardly delights and surprises. Watching the characters patiently unravel knots and ingeniously solve puzzles provides the delight. The surprises are the depth and breadth of variety represented in Sims’s overview of the genre. Humor and pathos, moralism and mercy, parody and tragedy, horror and retribution—the full spectrum of the human psyche is on display in this collection. The international cast of characters features authors and protagonists alike from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. They include a mild-mannered Catholic priest and a tough-talking Virginian, a folksy Canadian tracker and a wide-eyed teenaged boy, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, a blind man, a Musketeer, a bumbler, a dilettante, and, of course, that curiously observant Englishman with a penchant for violins and opium.

The "Laws" of Nature and Other Theories

Alan Lightman explains why what we understand to be true about the universe may not be true in other universes

By Margaret Renkl | December 21, 2011

December 20, 2011 There are laws, not made by humans but discovered by them, that explain the workings of the universe in perfectly clear, precise terms, notes Memphis native Alan Lightman in a new essay for Harper’s:

Nationally Noted

Tennessee writers are popping up on best-of lists all over the media

By Serenity Gerbman | December 19, 2011

December 19, 2011 A year ago, the future looked grim for Tennessee bookstore patrons. Beloved stores Carpe Librum in Knoxville and Davis-Kidd in Nashville were closing, and Davis-Kidd in Memphis faced an uncertain future. The Borders chain teetered toward failure, and the e-reader reached its tipping point, becoming one of the most popular holiday gift items. One year later, it’s clear that the physical bookstore is not only alive but possibly even experiencing something of a resurgence—just as Tennessee authors were bringing out some of the biggest books of the year.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher