Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

A Story of Women and Power

Toil and Trouble surveys witchy history

In Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult, Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson profile religious leaders, entertainers, psychic mediums, healers, activists, and more, from Puritan New England to the witch-friendly grounds of social media today.

Read more

Turning Something Awful into Something Good

A close look at death helps a boy grab hold of life

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s The Decomposition of Jack features a boy whose daily chores include the collection of roadkill. It’s a slightly gross, very funny, sweetly poignant story about so much more than death. Tubb will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on October 26.

Read more

How Right Made Might

Jon Meacham highlights Abraham Lincoln’s moral code in a new, essential biography

Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham continues his exploration of moral leadership and America’s search for a more perfect union in And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. Meacham will discuss the book at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville on October 23.

Read more

Fertile Ground for Art

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere travels outward and inward

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere leads us through mosquito clouds and dusty barns, inviting us to witness flow and change, the endangered and the enduring, the gone and the going away.

Read more

Seeing Through the Fog

Evil haunts every corner of Erica Waters’ The Restless Dark

In Erica Waters’ The Restless Dark, three young women navigate an insidious landscape, the true-crime podcast-loving people around them, and their own darkest impulses. Erica Waters will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

Read more

Portrait of the Artists

Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet takes on entwined familial and artistic legacies

When Ada Calhoun undertakes the task of completing a literary biography of Frank O’Hara — a project that had stumped her art critic father decades earlier — she engages complex dynamics of familial angst and artistic ambition, which she details in Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. Calhoun will appear at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 14-16.

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