Chapter 16 - Part 7

Waiting for Katrina

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is the 2016 Memphis Reads selection

By Peggy Burch | September 20, 2016

Salvage the Bones, a National Book Award winner, is the featured title for this year’s Memphis Reads program, and author Jesmyn Ward will be in Memphis to discuss the novel, which is narrated by a pregnant fifteen-year-old whose destitute family faces the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Ward will speak at Christian Brothers University on September 28 at 7 p.m., and at Rhodes College on September 29 at 6 p.m.

Summoned to Memphis

Novelist Lauren Groff headlines the 2016 Mid-South Book Festival

By Peggy Burch | September 2, 2016

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in fiction. Groff will be among seventy writers at the 2016 Mid-South Book Festival, held in Memphis September 9-11, 2016. Today she speaks with Chapter 16 about marriage, the trials of portraying anger and death in fiction, and the pleasures of writing in longhand.

A Cape Canaveral of the Soul

Patrick Ryan’s new stories place buoyant, striving characters in a small patch of Florida

By Peggy Burch | July 12, 2016

Set in Cape Canaveral in the late twentieth century, Patrick Ryan’s stories conjure a rich variety of intriguing souls, from a pregnant teen who wants to be Miss America to a gay sixteen-year-old with a crush on an ex-astronaut. Ryan will discuss The Dream Life of Astronauts in conversation with Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books in Nashville on July 19, 2016, at 6:30 p.m.

Dog Years

A life with pets forms the scaffolding of a new memoir by columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson

By Peggy Burch | May 6, 2016

May 6, 2016 Syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson will talk about The Dogs Buried Over the Bridge: A Memoir in Dog Years, at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on May 10, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. and at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on May 15, 2016, at 2 p.m. The book chronicles Johnson’s loves, losses, and Mississippi home life by way of the dogs who shared the journey.

Surviving the Family

Siblings stare down their childhoods in Ann Packer’s The Children’s Crusade

By Peggy Burch | April 11, 2016

April 11, 2016 Bestselling novelist Ann Packer will appear at The Skillery in Nashville on April 14, 2016, at 6:30 p.m. to read from and sign The Children’s Crusade, released this month in paperback. The novel, about a family that puts down roots in the 1950s in a wooded area that will become Silicon Valley, shifts among narratives by four siblings, each affected by the chemistry of their mother’s indifference and their father’s devotion.

Cash in the Capitol

Nation on the Take by Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman explains how the wealthy control Washington

By Peggy Burch | March 30, 2016

March 30, 2016 In Nation on the Take, investigative journalists Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman make an overwhelming case that money is polluting government and buying not just influence but legislation favorable to, and sometimes written by, special interests.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly