Brandon Taylor on his Southern roots and the joys of analog
Brandon Taylor’s prizewinning story collection, Filthy Animals, has just been released in paperback. He spoke with Chapter 16 about his Southern roots, his Baptist upbringing, how his brief career as a scientist has influenced his writing, and why he has been increasingly drawn to analog technologies in our digitally obsessed world.
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Critic and author Teju Cole thinks about photography and politics
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing.
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God’s Rascal examines the life of fundamentalist J. Frank Norris
“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.
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James Dickey in the classroom
In those days I wanted to become a novelist, but Mr. Dickey, author of a bestselling novel and wildly successful screenplay, taught only poetry, which he called in one of his book titles “the central motion.” So poetry it was.
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An interview with Museum of Appalachia founder John Rice Irwin
When he died in January 2022, historian John Rice Irwin was described as the “guardian of Appalachia’s past.” In a 2008 interview, he talked with poet Jesse Graves about his family and his life’s work.
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Neema Avashia explores community and identity in the South and beyond
In Another Appalachia, Neema Avashia explores what it is like to grow up both gay and the daughter of immigrants, making sense of life as both insider and outsider.
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