Chapter 16 - Part 570

Authors on the Plaza

Join us in Nashville for the twenty-second annual Southern Festival of Books

By Margaret Renkl | October 7, 2010

October 8, 2010 Writing tends to be a reclusive art, but Humanities Tennessee has lured 265 authors out of their garrets for the twenty-second annual Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word. The festival, a free event for the whole family, will be held this weekend in Nashville on Legislative Plaza. Whether your tastes run to memoirs or cookbooks, literary novels or thrillers, biographies or beach reads, picture books for the kids or adult-only fare, this year’s sessions cover the literary waterfront.

Carrying the Fire

Why Cormac McCarthy should have won the Nobel Prize

By Ed Tarkington | October 7, 2010

October 7, 2010 Since 1993, the Swedish Academy has spurned writers from the U.S. as “too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.” But just yesterday, British bookies were giving better than three-to-one odds that this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature would go to Tennessee native Cormac McCarthy. We know why.

Captive Audience

The protagonist of Laura Lippman’s new thriller hasn’t moved as far beyond the past as she believes

By Sean Kinch | October 6, 2010

October 6, 2010 Laura Lippman’s new crime novel, I’d Know You Anywhere, begins where most mysteries end. The killer has been caught and incarcerated; apparently, justice has been served. Twenty years after he raped and murdered a series of young women in suburban Washington, D.C., Walter Bowman sits on Death Row awaiting execution, his appeals finally exhausted. His last request is to make contact with the one girl he kidnapped but, unlike the unfortunate others, did not kill. Lippman will read from the novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 7 at 6 p.m.

A Prelinguistic Place

Molly Peacock talks with Chapter 16 about writing, performing, and teaching poetry

By Maria Browning | October 5, 2010

October 5, 2010 Molly Peacock is known as a writer of vibrant, sensual poetry and as a nonfiction writer with a particular gift for articulating the challenges faced by women artists. She shares some thoughts with Chapter 16 on her vocation as a poet, and on her latest book, which examines late-life creativity. She will read from and discuss her work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on October 7 at 7 p.m.

Looking at the Pictures

A new Nashville gallery show features picture books in the making

By Joe Nolan | October 4, 2010

October 4, 2010 Now on display in East Nashville’s Art & Invention Gallery is an exhibit of children’s books and related items by five familiar faces in Nashville’s art scene. Athena Workman, Bethany Taylor, Bill Elliot, Greg Morneau, and Julie Sola created the work in the gallery’s second annual Proto Pulp–Classic Books of the Future, a collection of children’s picture books-in-progress. The show runs through October 17.

Enter the Dragon

Peter Ho Davies talks with Chapter 16 about writing, teaching, and growing up in a Welsh-Chinese home

By Paul V. Griffith | September 30, 2010

September 30, 2010 Peter Ho Davies is author of the acclaimed novel The Welsh Girl, as well as two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has been much anthologized and has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among other publications. In 2003, Granta magazine included Davies on its top-twenty list, “Best of Young British Novelists.” He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and, in 2008, was a recipient of the Pen/Malamud Award. He took questions from Chapter 16 prior to his Nashville appearance at 7 p.m. on September 30 in Vanderbilt University’s Buttrick Hall, Room 203.

Camilla and the Caterpillars

By Frances Figart, illustrated by Matt Brass
Smokies Life
68 pages
$14.95

A young girl’s encounter with an extraordinary caterpillar in the Great Smoky Mountains leads her and her family on a quest to plant a national park right in their own backyard.

This environmentally themed chapter book for ages 6 through 11 introduces young readers to important ecological concepts including habitat loss and the interdependence of native species and offers a compelling grassroots solution through native-plant gardening that invites anyone to take part in addressing the growing biodiversity crisis.

~the publisher