Motherless Child
“A Haunting of My Own Name”
Damaged Goods
Both in and out of Place
The Best-Laid Plans
Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby
Menu
Search

Paul V. Griffith

Leaving the Whole World Blind

Death-penalty opponent Margaret Vandiver talks with Chapter 16 about the future of capital punishment in the Volunteer State

By Paul V. Griffith |

January 12, 2011 In their essay collection, Tennessee’s New Abolitionists, editors Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver document efforts to halt capital punishment in Tennessee. In an email interview with Chapter 16, Vandiver, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis, weighs in on the future of capital punishment in the Volunteer State. Vandiver and contributor Pete Gathje, a professor of Christian ethics at Memphis Theological Seminary, will read from Tennessee’s New Abolitionists at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on January 15 at 1 p.m.

Read more

Hebrew Lessons

Memphis author Steve Stern spins the tale of a cryogenic rabbi into an exploration of truth, fantasy, tradition, and trial

By Paul V. Griffith |

December 27, 2010 Rummaging through the family deep freeze, fifteen-year-old Bernie Karp finds pork tenderloins and an ancient rabbi frozen in a block of ice. The rabbi’s journey from nineteenth-century Poland to freezer and beyond—and his effect on those he meets—is the stuff of Memphis native Steve Stern’s latest novel, The Frozen Rabbi, a hilarious, poignant romp through the Jewish diaspora to the very firmament itself. The book is on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s list of best books for 2010.

Read more

Ties That Bind

Author-physician Abraham Verghese talks with Chapter 16 about his dual career and his latest novel, Cutting For Stone

By Paul V. Griffith |

December 20, 2010 An accomplished physician and teacher, Abraham Verghese put his life on hold to attend the celebrated Iowa Writers Workshop. Since graduating from the program in 1991, he’s balanced his day job with a writing career, publishing two nonfiction books and contributing to the likes of Esquire and The Atlantic Monthly. In his first novel, Cutting For Stone, Verghese tells the story of Marion Stone, an orphaned twin conceived of an illicit affair between an Indian nun and a dashing but volatile British surgeon. With wise and compelling prose, the epic tale weaves its themes of love, betrayal, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice together with the destinies of a country and a proud yet fractured family. Verghese appears February 26 at noon in 208 Light Hall on the Vanderbilt University campus, and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 27 at 2 p.m.

Read more

Memphis Soul Stew

Memphis cookbook unites the Bluff City’s two great loves: music and food

By Paul V. Griffith |

December 8, 2010 Memphis likes things a little hotter and a little spicier than Nashville, its sister city to the east. You hear it in the music and you taste it in the food: two things Memphians take very seriously. It’s only right, then, that the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission would publish a cookbook, A Taste of Memphis Music—and it’s only right that its contents would come from Memphis’s legendary music community. In recipes as varied and soulful as the Memphis Sound itself, A Taste of Memphis Music takes would-be chefs down Beale Street, across Main, and into the heart of one of the South’s great food cities.

Read more

The Season's the Reason … for Delicious Southern Cooking

Tammy Algood emphasizes seasonality and freshness in The Complete Southern Cookbook, an ambitious collection of the South’s best recipes

By Paul V. Griffith |

November 22, 2010 At a time when bookstore shelves are sagging with glossy, Food Network-style cookbooks, Tammy Algood’s The Complete Southern Cookbook is an anomaly. It contains no stylish pictures or fancy ingredients, no delectable yet impossible-to-pull-off meal plans or fancifully-coiffed celebrity chefs. But what Algood’s book lacks in glitz it makes up for in practicality — which is, after all, what most home chefs really need. In crisp, no-nonsense recipes, Algood takes readers on a virtual tour of the Southern kitchen.

Read more

Rebel, Rebel

Poet Reid Ward contemplates life, love, and responsibility from the confines of his “cage”

By Paul V. Griffith |

October 19, 2010 Reid Ward is a preacher’s kid, and like of lot of “PK”s, he’s a natural-born insurgent. During high school, Ward was bright and likeable but not exactly focused on academics. More than anything, he hated his English classes—“I don’t remember ever reading a book all the way through until after high school,” he says. When he was eighteen, Ward fell from the roof of his family home and broke his neck. Paralyzed from the chest down, he ultimately discovered a lifeline in literature. Reid Ward reads from his new poetry collection, The Atrophy of the Sun, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on October 19 at 7 p.m.

Read more
TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING