Madison Smartt Bell reads from his new novel in a podcast for BOMB Magazine
March 22, 2011 Last month, Chapter 16 published an interview with Madison Smartt Bell and an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, The Color of Night. Now Bell gives a reading from the book in BOMB Magazine‘s series, “Fiction for Driving Across America.” Download the podcast here.
Read more
Robert J. Blake’s new picture book teaches kids how friendship really works
March 22, 2011 Robert J. Blake’s latest picture book features the tale of two best friends who’ll do anything to stay together. The protagonists of Painter and Ugly are a pair of dogs whose love for one another is nearly matched by their love of competing in Alaskan dog-sled races. Blake, who is also the book’s illustrator, immerses readers in the story of a Junior Iditarod race, a grueling test in which a group of competing teenagers push their dog-sled teams on a nearly eighty-mile trek into the Alaskan wilderness, only to complete the return run the very next day, after a night of camping in the cold with their dog teams. He recently answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.
Read more
Ruta Sepetys’s YA debut chronicles Stalin’s murder of millions
March 21, 2011 In 1939, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of millions of Baltic civilians to forced labor camps. More than twenty million people perished in the gulags, but even those who managed to survive and return home were forbidden to reveal the atrocities they’d suffered in the camps. Nashville author Ruta Sepetys, whose stunning debut novel Between Shades of Gray aims, finally, to tell the long-suppressed truth about Stalin’s mass atrocities, grew up in the culture of silence imposed on camp survivors.
Read moreAl Gore leaves his longtime publisher to join Jon Meacham at Random House
March 21, 2011 Al Gore has left Rodale, publisher of his mega-bestselling books, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Our Choice (2009), and plans to publish his next book with Random House. (A third bestseller, The Assault on Reason, was published by Penguin in 2007.) The still-untitled book, reportedly about “our global future,” is due next year and will be edited by Jon Meacham, a Chattanooga native who recently left his post as editor of Newsweek.
Read moreThe news just keeps getting worse for people who like to browse for books in person
March 18, 2011 Readers in Knoxville were still mourning the impending loss of Carpe Librum, the beloved independent, when the news came that Ohio-based bookstore chain Joseph-Beth would close Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, a fixture in the community for thirty years.
Read moreGarrison Keillor highlights the work of Nashville poet Mark Jarman
March 17, 2011 Today Garrison Keillor’s daily NPR feature, The Writer’s Almanac, will highlight a poem from Mark Jarman’s new collection, Bone Fires. “A Prayer for Our Daughters” begins with these lovely lines:
May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven’t written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.
