Welcome to Chapter 16, an online journal about the literary side of life in Tennessee. There’s a certain irony in the whole concept of a website devoted to celebrating books. (Wags might claim there’s also an irony in the concept of a literary life in Tennessee.) The Internet can be a dispiriting place, where total cranks and nincompoops effortlessly assume the mantle of authority, and anonymous comments savage the most enlightened points of view. Internet publications tend to be instantaneous and often incompletely considered — the very opposite of a book. Plus, it’s a sensory wasteland, lacking the satisfying heft of a book, the rustle of pages, the lovely scent of glue and ink.
Read moreBook Excerpt: They Came to Nashville
Emmylou Harris tells Marshall Chapman about moving to Nashville in a flesh-colored Ford with a baby bed tied to the roof
My earliest memories of Emmylou are sketchy at best. Let’s see. At one point―it may have been 1972―Emmy was waiting tables at a Polynesian restaurant out on White Bridge Road at about the same time that Rodney Crowell and I were working at T.G.I. Friday’s. I can’t remember if I met Emmylou then or not. But I distinctly remember the first time I heard her singing voice.
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Fireworks, at Home and Elsewhere
In his new YA novel, Silas House explores post-Vietnam tensions and summertime self discovery
Today’s young readers, coming of age in a post-9/11 world, should be deeply familiar with a central question of our times: what does it mean to be patriotic, to love—and protect, or protest—one’s country? It’s one question, among others, that they’ll find tenderly explored in Silas House‘s first young-adult novel, Eli the Good.
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New Fiction from the Unsettled South
Is a story still “Southern” if it sounds like a bulletin from Anywhere, U.S.A.?
“Rootedness used to be the core quality of Southern culture,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in his introduction to New Stories from the South 2009: The Year’s Best. Bell goes on to note that the lives of contemporary Southerners have taken on a “nomadic quality” that competes with the former importance of place. And that presents a problem for this collection, the twenty-fourth in the series.
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Reasons for and Advantages of Fiction
Former Bredesen speechwriter Lydia Peelle discusses her debut story collection—and the pleasure, and usefulness, of writing what you don’t know
It’s impossible to tell from reading her debut story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, that Lydia Peelle isn’t a native Tennessean. Chapter 16 investigates how a born-and-bred New Englander—a woman who grew up in Massachusetts, went to boarding school in New Hampshire and to college at Amherst—could write a collection of stories that places her firmly among this generation’s finest Southern writers.
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After Memphis
Journalist Clay Risen looks at the legacy of King assassination, then and now
Clay Risen‘s A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination offers a detailed examination of the riots that ravaged U.S. cities after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including firsthand recollections, Risen depicts a country that was not united in mourning, but divided by rage and fear.
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