Chapter 16 - Part 534

The Past at Present

Bestselling historical novelist Robert Hicks talks with Chapter 16 about historic preservation

By Paul McCoy | January 27, 2011

January 27, 2011 Novelist Robert Hicks was standing in the McGavock family parlor of Carnton Plantation, talking about Carnton Plantation: Where the Old South Died, when an antique clock struck. Hicks fell silent as three distinct metallic chimes drifted through the stately chambers of the home. “You see? Right there,” he said. “Imagine this parlor in November of 1864 and the hundreds of wounded lying here, in the halls, in the bedrooms. The sound of that clock. Every hour on the hour. That’s a sound they would have heard.”

"The Great Equalizer is Not Death but Stupidity"

By Amy Wright | January 26, 2011

January 26, 2011 Amy Wright is the author of two chapbooks, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and Farm. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals or collections, including American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia. She is the prose editor of Zone 3 Press and an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University. She spends her time conducting interviews with various artists and writers. Examples are available at Zone 3. Amy Wright will read from Farm at the Montgomery County Public Library on January 27 at 5:30 p.m.

Fairy-Tale Frolic

Jennifer Trafton debuts with a charming tale for young readers

By Lyda Phillips | January 25, 2011

January 25, 2011 In The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, Jennifer Trafton creates a delightful fairy-tale world. This beautifully illustrated novel introduces a land inhabited by very serious Leafeaters; overly hilarious Rumblebumps; a spoiled young king who loves pepper and is saved by the love of a cat; Worvil the Worrier, whose imagination paralyzes him; and especially Persimmony Smudge, an irrepressible and courageous heroine. The inhabitants call their home “The Island at the Center of Everything,” but as it turns out, it’s a sleeping giant who’s really at the center of everything. Trafton will read from and sign copies of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic at Cover To Cover Bookstore in Arlington on Jan. 27 at 5 p.m.

Her Postage Stamp of Native Soil

Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, updates Faulkner’s Mississippi

By Susannah Felts | January 24, 2011

January 24, 2011 Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the setting of Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, is a tiny town nestled in the swampy, piney depths of the Gulf Coast, where few leave and solid jobs are fewer still. It is a world that Ward, currently writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, knows intimately. Her deep empathy for the people of this place, and her attentiveness to its landscape, make the book a stirring, evocative portrait of two brave young African-American men who ask for little beyond the love and support of their maternal grandmother, Ma-mee. Ward will read at the Hodges Library on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus on January 25 at 7 p.m.

Gamer High

Clay Risen considers an unusual charter school

By Margaret Renkl | January 24, 2011

January 24, 2011 In the February/March issue of BookForum, author and Chapter 16 contributor Clay Risen reviews a new book by video-game designer Jane McGonigal. Reality Is Broken examines the goals and effectiveness of a unique New York City charter school called Quest to Learn, where students tackle assignments designed to mimic the experience of playing a video game.

Chronicled

Kate Daniels’s poem “Disjunction” appears in an unlikely place

By Margaret Renkl | January 23, 2011

January 23, 2011 Kate Daniels’s poem “Disjunction” appears in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Disjunction,” which was included in the 1998 collection, Four Testimonies, begins,

     On my knees in my office,
     leaning over the metal can
     of waste, I squeeze my breasts
     to express the milk that’s accrued
     in my graduate seminar on postmodern

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses