Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Southbound

Imani Perry explores the South’s centrality to the American story

Imani Perry’s South to America weaves history, travelogue, and memoir to argue that the U.S. South is not a place apart, but central to the American story. 

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Defining One’s Place in the World

A rare map points the way to a dreamlike — yet deadly — destination

When a young woman’s estranged father is found dead, her investigation into a seemingly insignificant vintage map in his possession leads her down a path fraught with riddles, conspiracies, secrets, and lies. Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers is an otherworldly thriller that will appeal to fans of V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

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Faction Jackson

David S. Brown places Andrew Jackson in the partisan politics of his time

In The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson, biographer David S. Brown explains the world that shaped the seventh president of the United States, while illustrating how Jackson’s brand of raucous, divisive politics changed the new American nation.

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Sex, God, and Politics

By recounting historic debates over sex and morality, R. Marie Griffith explains our political divides

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Moral Combat, Chattanooga native R. Marie Griffith tells the history of the twentieth-century United States through religious debates over issues of sex and morality, exploring such topics as birth control, sex education, LGBT rights, and sexual harassment.

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Secrets and Lies

J.T. Ellison channels Agatha Christie in the suspense-filled Her Dark Lies

At the wedding of the year on an exotic island off the Italian coast, a Nashville artist and the wealthy man she intends to marry become embroiled in mystery and intrigue in J.T. Ellison’s novel, Her Dark Lies. Ellison will deliver the keynote address at the Clarksville Writers Conference banquet on May 19.

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Teller of Tales

An unreliable narrator keeps readers guessing in Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater

From the outset, it’s clear that young Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her cousin Charisse’s disappearance and murder in Valerie Nieman’s coming of age/suspense thriller In the Lonely Backwater.

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