Chapter 16 - Part 539

Author in the Prime of His Life

Brad Watson, who just won a Guggenheim, has come a long way from driving a garbage truck

By Susannah Felts | April 22, 2011

April 22, 2011 To be a fiction writer from Mississippi is to inherit a literary legacy as heavy as Gulf Coast air in August, one rippling with stories of lives both remarkable and remarkably debauched. Enter the novelist and short-story writer Brad Watson, whose fiction does not traffic in what his friend Barry Hannah dismissed as “a canned dream of the South.” Still, it is laced with just enough distinctly Southern settings and characters for a reader to feel she’s getting the real deal—a Mississippi writer who is carrying on the literary legacy of his home state. Watson will be the visiting writer at Nashville’s Montgomery Bell Academy April 25-26. On April 25, he will give a public reading in the Pfeffer Lecture Hall at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

"I Dream it Every Night"

In her charming memoir, Every Day by the Sun, Dean Faulkner Wells gives flesh and blood to the memory of William Faulkner—and of the Oxford of old

By Ed Tarkington | April 21, 2011

April 20, 2011 When Dean Faulkner Wells was thirteen, she attended the premier of Intruder in the Dust at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family. With the spotlight shining on William Faulkner, Wells came to a dawning understanding of her uncle’s role in literature—and in the world. Now the author of a new memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, she talks with Chapter 16 about William Faulkner’s literary legacy, how her extended family wrestled with the Civil Rights movement, and why Cormac McCarthy should win the Nobel Prize. Wells will present a slide show and discuss Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 21 at 5 p.m.

The Freedom They Fight For

The female artists in Jewly Hight’s new study of Americana music are making music their way—even if their record labels aren’t always thrilled

By Susannah Felts | April 20, 2011

April 20, 2011 Part revivalist genre, part American-music-melting-pot, Americana music is “born of considerable artistic freedom—though, when a major record label is involved,” writes Nashville music journalist Jewly Hight, “the freedom may have to be fought for.” In Right By Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs, Hight considers eight remarkable female singer-songwriters: Lucinda Williams, Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, Elizabeth Cook, and Abigail Washburn. These women have all fought that good fight, but what they share most is their unconventionality and a gutsy dedication to their own evolving visions, often at the expense of broader fame or commercial success. Hight will discuss and sign Right By Her Roots on April 23, 11 a.m., at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. During the event, she will also interview Americana musician Sarah Siskind, prior to Siskind’s own performance. The cost of this event is included with museum admission and is free to museum members.

Report from Chattanooga, Day Three

Sadness and laughter punctuated the final day of the Conference on Southern Literature

By Maria Browning | April 19, 2011

April 19, 2011 After a few closing words from Allen Wier, the conference was over, though a few folks lingered to get a last book signed or picture taken. It will be two years before this wonderful group of writers and readers gathers again. That seems like a long wait.

A Taste for Murder

Michael Lee West’s latest novel is a mystery of gastronomical proportions

By Tina LoTufo | April 19, 2011

April 19, 2011 Set in and around Charleston’s historic district, Michael Lee West’s Gone with a Handsomer Man mixes candy-colored row houses, crab cakes, and high humidity with betrayal, greed, and long-lost love. The result is a bittersweet confection that’s lighter than a praline and smoother than a peach martini. West will discuss Gone with a Handsomer Man at Books-A-Million in Nashville on April 21 at 7 p.m.

Report from Chattanooga, Day Two

At the Conference on Southern Literature, the Fellowship of Southern Writers is more than the name of an honor society

By Maria Browning | April 18, 2011

April 18, 2011 Two days into the conference, it was clear that these writers are part of fellowship in much more than name. The older members have known each other for many years, and they’ve all been involved in teaching and encouraging the younger ones. During his panel appearance, Allan Gurganus talked about the pleasure of hearing the reading by Ann Patchett, who was his student at Sarah Lawrence. During George Singleton’s reading, I was sitting next to Richard Bausch, who told me Singleton had been his student at George Mason University. During his long teaching career at Hollins University, Richard Dillard influenced the work of several of the Fellows, including Jill McCorkle and Madison Smartt Bell. In the course of the panels and presentations, members who have passed away are often remembered fondly—particularly George Garrett, who nurtured many young writers. It would be fascinating to see a lineage chart that mapped all these connections.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher