Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Lucky Thirteen

Jerry Joyner’s inventive 1975 collaboration with Remy Charlip hits shelves in a new edition

Thirteen, Jerry Joyner’s 1975 collaboration with artist Remy Charlip, returns to shelves this month in a new edition for a new generation of young readers. Joyner will visit Parnassus Books on May 23 to discuss the book, as well as his remarkable career.

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“We’re Loud and We’re Boisterous”

The new Center for Southern Literary Arts brings Tayari Jones to Memphis

On February 27, the Center for Southern Literary Arts in Memphis will bring novelist Tayari Jones to the stage of the Halloran Centre for Performing Arts to talk about her new book, An American Marriage.

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The Play’s the Thing

A Nashville theologian considers the genius of James P. Carse

For James P. Carse, people are never not playing in one way or another. How we play—the expectations we bring and the invitations we are open to from moment to moment—is the whole human deal. Carse will give a free public address at Belmont University in Nashville on February 8 as part of Belmont’s Faith and Culture Symposium. The event is free and open to the public.

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Creative Amnesia, or the Persistence of Magic

Novelist Steve Stern found his fictional world by searching for a lost Jewish tradition

June 1, 2015 I grew up wanting something I couldn’t name. I was raised in the Reform Jewish “tradition,” though the word here is gross hyperbole. The temple I attended as a kid in Memphis represented a variety of Judaism designed to be invisible, to blend indistinguishably with the Christ-haunted Southern landscape. As a consequence, I was virtually untouched by tradition and had not even an awareness of its absence. Nevertheless, one Sunday, playing hooky from confirmation class, I went exploring the old red brick pile of our temple along with a couple of partners in crime.

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Book Excerpt: Adam Ross’s Ladies and Gentlemen

With the opening pages of “Middlemen,” Adam Ross gives Chapter 16 readers an early look at his forthcoming story collection

June 9, 2011 In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen- year- olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.

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