Chapter 16 - Part 536

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

Unanointed, Unannealed

Journalist Stanley Booth considers his friend William Eggleston, the father of modern color photography

By Stanley Booth | January 20, 2011

January 20, 2011 Memphis artist William Eggleston is all over the news: this week marks the closing of a retrospective exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the announcement of a proposed Eggleston museum in his native Memphis, and the opening of an Eggleston exhibit at the Frist Museum of Art in Nashville. In addition, Twin Palms Publishers recently brought out a new collection of Eggleston prints—itself a companion volume to Michael Almereyda’s documentary film, William Eggleston in the Real World. Today, journalist Stanley Booth, a longtime friend of Eggleston from his own Memphis days, considers the work of the man known as “the father of modern color photography.”

A Disturbing Sweetness

Poet Diann Blakely looks at the work of legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston

By Diann Blakely | January 20, 2011

January 20, 2011 One of the most striking images in Michael Almereyda’s documentary film, William Eggleston in the Real World, also appears on the cover of the new Eggleston collection, For Now: Eggleston’s wife, Rosa, lies sleeping with a yellow-flowered duvet bunched across her middle, one slender, aristocratic hand holding the sheets in place near the pubic region. Has the couple just had sex? Rosa’s lovely long legs end in feet that appear slightly dirty; the room is small, dingy, and low-ceilinged. The gaping closet door has a pink, pocketed storage container hanging over the top, and a plastic, brown-nippled baby bottle sits on top of a staticky television. Remember when TV used to go “off the air” at night? There’s something yellow and disturbing about the portrait.

Tournament-Ready

Amy Greene’s Bloodroot makes the 2011 Tournament of Books

By Margaret Renkl | January 20, 2011

January 20, 2011 The Morning News has entered Amy Greene’s debut novel Bloodroot in its Seventh Annual Tournament of Books. The competition, which pits sixteen of the most critically acclaimed novels of the previous year against each other in a seeded bracket, doesn’t kick off until March 7. The news today “will allow time for Tournament fans to begin reading so they can follow along with the blood sport,” notes the press release.

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