Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Traitor to Whom?

Amanda McCrina’s YA novel explores shifting allegiances in a time of conflict

Franklin writer Amanda McCrina’s new YA novel, Traitor, follows Toyla, a young soldier whose family heritage embodies both sides of a wartime conflict in the city of Lwów.   

Read more

The Singing Wire Between Joy and Grief

You Want More spans the career of one of the South’s most beloved storytellers

With You Want More: Selected Stories, Hub City Press delivers a career retrospective of the writer The New York Times called “among the great pillars of Southern literature.” George Singleton will discuss the book with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips at a virtual event hosted by Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on September 28 and will appear at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Read more

A Multitude of Elegies

Ayad Akhtar creates a powerful literary assemblage in Homeland Elegies

Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies is a dazzling, genre-busting book, a work of autofiction with the potential to shock us out of our complacency. Akhtar will discuss the book at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Read more

Dim Lights, Dark Hallways

In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist tries to makes sense of her family’s unraveling

In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty, a first-generation American whose family immigrated from Ghana, learns young that religion cannot explain her family’s misfortunes, so she turns to science for answers. Gyasi will discuss Transcendent Kingdom at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Read more

Trapped in the Dusk

Erica Waters’ Ghost Wood Song is a suspenseful story about grief, bravery, and growing up

In Nashville writer Erica Waters’ debut novel, Ghost Wood Song, a riveting coming-of-age thriller, Shady Grove sets out on a quest to unearth her family’s most sinister secrets so that she can finally lay the past to rest and protect the ones still living. Waters will appear at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

Read more

Hardship as Possibility

Contemporary Appalachian writers profile one another in Step into the Circle

Step into the Circle brings together Appalachian writers and photographers to profile some of the region’s beloved literary forces. Contributors Silas House, Lee Smith, Jason Kyle Howard, Wiley Cash, and Mallory Cash will appear at the 2020 Southern Festival of Books, held online October 1-11.

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