Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Michael Ray Taylor

The Heart in Ruins

Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This weaves a haunting memoir around abandoned spaces

In Imagine Wanting Only This, a graphic work of nonfiction that is part personal memoir and part travelogue of urban ruins, Kristen Radtke combines brilliant comic art with poetic prose. Radtke will appear at the 2017 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 13-15.

Read more

Funny Business

Peter Cooper writes of secrets, legends, and laughs in Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride

Peter Cooper—Nashville music critic, singer, and senior director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum—relates some of his greatest musical adventures in Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride. Cooper will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 16 at 6:30 p.m. and at The Station Inn in Nashville on May 26 at 8 p.m.

Read more

The March of Science

In The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell writes with a poet’s ear and a biologist’s precision

In his 2012 book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, David George Haskell revealed the web of life hidden within a small circle of old-growth Tennessee forest. His second book, The Songs of Trees, expands that web to the globe itself. Haskell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30 at 2 p.m.

Read more

If It Ain’t Broke…

With The Fix David Baldacci cements the success of yet another page-turning series

Suspense master David Baldacci’s The Fix, third installment in the Amos Decker series, joins five other successful novel series developed by the prolific author. Baldacci will discuss The Fix at the Nashville Public Library on April 17 at 6:15 p.m.

Read more

American Tragedy

Daniel J. Sharfstein captures two larger-than-life opponents of the Nez Perce war in Thunder in the Mountains

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War, a new work of narrative history by Daniel J. Sharfstein, vividly portrays a bloody conflict and its leaders, in the process offering new insight into the enduring power of dissent. Sharfstein will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 6 at 6:30 p.m.

Read more

Mon Dieu!

Holly Tucker’s City of Light, City of Poison is a nonfiction thriller of Parisian intrigue

Holly Tucker’s City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris, a gripping tale of murder and royal intrigue set in seventeenth-century Paris, reads like the best historical fiction as it presents well-documented—and nefarious—facts. Tucker will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on March 21 at 6:30 p.m.

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