Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Now in Print

D.B. Henson’s DIY publication yielded 100,000 ebook sales—and a traditional publishing contract

July 26, 2011 Published as an Amazon ebook in April 2010, D.B. Henson’s mystery, Deed to Death, proved phenomenally successful. By word of tweet, Facebook, blog, and online review, the debut novel sold 100,000 copies and made the Best of 2010 Kindle Customer Favorites list, which includes the likes of Stieg Larson and Laura Lippman. The Nashville author’s success got the attention of uber-agent Noah Lukeman, who offered to represent her. He sold Deed to Death to Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone Books, and the rest is … well, you know the rest. Henson will sign Deed to Death on July 30 at 2 p.m. at Mysteries & More in Nashville. She will also appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 14-16.

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Always a Market

As Borders fades, Knoxville’s Union Ave. Books rides high on optimism

July 25, 2011 Melinda Meador of Knoxville’s Union Ave. Books counters web-wide moaning over the liquidation of the late great Borders bookstore chain with pragmatism and excitement.

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An All-American Movement

Charles Euchner captures the moment when white America began to understand the justice of civil rights

July 25, 2011 Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, is widely considered among the greatest speeches in American history and a high point of the civil-rights movement. But its deserved fame has long obscured the hundreds of thousands of people who also participated in the march: black teenagers from Alabama, white ministers from Kansas, celebrities from Hollywood, and activists from Harlem, all of them gathered in a peaceful demonstration for equal rights unlike anything ever seen in America. In Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, newly out in paperback, Charles Euchner, a Chattanooga native and graduate of Vanderbilt University, has written the story of that day from the perspective of these important, if anonymous, participants in the march. Chapter 16 recently spoke with him by phone.

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Hidden Costs

In Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones explores the burden of secrecy

July 22, 2011 In Silver Sparrow, the third novel from Tayari Jones, a girl named Dana Lynn Yarboro grows up a captive to her parents’ secrets: her father, James Witherspoon, who is married to her mother, has another wife and daughter. From an early age, Dana learns what it means to be an “outside child,” forbidden to tell anyone of her real father. But over time her desire to know her sister, and her desire to be known, gets the best of her, and she begins to pick away at the thin membrane of secrecy that keeps the girls apart. Set in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow is a thoughtful story about bigamy, but it is also a lovely, realistic portrait of two teenage African-American girls, and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Tayari Jones will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

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Reconsidering Scarlett

Thanks to the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gone With the Wind, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is back in the news

July 22, 2011 In the opening of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, Gerald O’Hara makes an observation his daughter Scarlett never forgets: “Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for t’is the only thing in this world that lasts.” He might have noted that certain pernicious myths have staying power, too. Not least among them, of course, is the notion of a noble Lost Cause that lurks behind the Confederate nostalgia of Gone With the Wind itself.

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Seeing Sparks

Minton Sparks brings to life the South of strained relations and small-town sirens

July 21, 2011 Fresh from sold-out shows in New York City and an unprecedented award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Minton Sparks continues to pursue a literary art form she invented from scratch. Now this genre-defying performance poet, songwriter, and novelist—whose fans and collaborators include Dorothy Allison, Marshall Chapman, and John Prine—is back home in Nashville, but already she’s got her eye on Broadway.

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