Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Absurdity and Tenderness

George Singleton’s stories sneak up on you

George Singleton’s The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs shows the storyteller in top form. Singleton will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.

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A Museum of Revelations

Novelist Thrity Umrigar examines themes of home, family relationships, and social class

Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, The Museum of Failures, brings readers to vibrant Bombay through a protagonist reconciling a complicated relationship with home. Umrigar will discuss The Museum of Failures at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.

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Seeking Consensus

Steve Inskeep depicts a principled Lincoln who built coalitions out of thin air

Steve Inskeep’s  Differ We Must delivers a brisk yet incisive collection of 16 encounters throughout the course of Abraham Lincoln’s career, revealing valuable lessons for our own time. Inskeep will appear with historian Heather Cox Richardson at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library on October 12.

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The Wonderful Inseparability of Form and Content

Oxford scholar Emma Smith on the cultural history of the book

Emma Smith’s Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers is a critical look at books as objects and the ways they have been bought and sold, used and abused, feared and celebrated, reviled and fetishized, bound, banned, and burned throughout history. Smith will deliver the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment Lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis on October 19.

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Freedom Fighter

A trip through the mind of civil rights icon Julian Bond

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Race Man: Selected Works, 1960-2015 collects a wide array of writings from civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose life provides a model of servant leadership.

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Romance and Revolution

Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors creates a world of false facades and alter egos

In Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, celebrated writer W. Somerset Maugham visits friends in the Malay Peninsula during a time of personal crisis and political upheaval. Tan will discuss The House of Doors at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.

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