Chapter 16 - Part 505

A License to Lie

Internationally acclaimed South African poet Antjie Krog talks with Chapter 16 about the essential instability of the first-person voice

By Charlotte Pence | November 11, 2011

November 11, 2011 Internationally acclaimed journalist, poet, and playwright Antjie Krog was born into a family of Afrikaner writers and grew up on a farm within a conservative Afrikaans-speaking community. She published her first book at age seventeen and since then has continued to write groundbreaking work about South African injustices. On November 15 and 16, she will give a lecture and a poetry reading in Memphis at Rhodes College. Both events are free and open to the public.

Bigger, Better, and Full of Books

The new Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt throws open its doors, and Nashville readers are wowed

By Sarah Norris | November 10, 2011

November 10, 2011 Maybe this is simply five months of deprivation talking, but walking into Barnes & Noble at Vanderbilt for the first time feels a bit like visiting the Sistine Chapel. It is, frankly, grand. The new campus store is only 7,000 square feet larger than the old Rand location, but the place feels, for many reasons, about a million times bigger. Inside the new Nashville bookstore, 67,000 trade titles are waiting, along with a total of seventy-nine employees to help readers find new books they’ll love.

Adding On

Robert Morgan retells the history of America’s westward expansion

By Chris Scott | November 9, 2011

November 9, 2011 In Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion, bestselling novelist and historian Robert Morgan tells the true stories of the men who added the territories from the Appalachians to the Pacific, thereby making a country out of a continent. Morgan will discuss Lions of the West at 7 p.m. on November 14 at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.

A Master of Fact

Legendary nonfiction writer John McPhee heads to Tennessee to accept the Nashville Public Library Literary Award

By Michael Ray Taylor | November 8, 2011

November 8, 2011 John McPhee is known for taking obscure topics and making them fascinating. As McPhee heads to Tennessee this week to accept the eighth annual Nashville Public Library Literary Award, Chapter 16’s Michael Ray Taylor considers the legendary author’s influence on the craft of creative nonfiction. McPhee will give a free public reading at the Nashville Public Library on November 12 at 10 a.m.

That Great American Style Icon, the King James Bible

For Robert Alter, the real rapture of the King James Bible is not in what it says but in the way it says it

By Beth Waltemath | November 7, 2011

November 3, 2011 In Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, Robert Alter explores the various ways the King James Version and its assimilation into American speech have shaped the literary styles of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson. Prior to his appearances on November 10 at the University of Memphis and November 11 at the 1611 Symposium at Rhodes College in Memphis, Alter answered questions from Chapter 16 about the way “a set of texts rendered in English four hundred years ago can still fire the imagination of writers who differ extremely from each other and from the Bible.”

Another Star for Michael Sims

PW praises The Dead Witness, due in January

By Margaret Renkl | November 7, 2011

November 7, 2011 Michael Sims must be getting used to rave reviews. Following a summer of praise for The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, now in its third printing, Sims is already earning accolades for his next book.

Tias and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us

By Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, illustrated by Josie Del Castillo
Seal Press
304 pages
$30

“Within these pages, I found my abuela, my tías and my primas — laughing, crying, and nodding alongside me. This book is a gift of understanding, and loving one’s family, even when our families are complicated and painful. It’s a beautiful reminder of the power of storytelling and the profound connection of kinship.”

~ Paola Mendoza, author, organizer and filmmaker