Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Hero Complex

Jaden Terrell talks with Chapter 16 about her debut thriller, Racing the Devil, her protagonist—a sweetheart of a disgraced ex-cop—and her plans for a ten-book series

February 3, 2012 As a member of two writers’ groups—the venerable Quill and Dagger, and Sisters in Crime—and as an organizer of the Killer Nashville conference, Jaden Terrell is a major player in the crime-novelist scene in Nashville. Her debut novel, Racing the Devil, is the first in a planned series of ten novels featuring Jared McKean, an ex-cop turned private investigator. He is burdened by both a Galahad complex and a tendency toward violence, but still hasn’t lost his essential sweetness. Terrell answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to her reading at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 11 at 1 p.m.

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Ecstasy and Perversion

Tales of the New World, the new short-story collection by PEN-Faulkner Award winner Sabina Murray, finds the sublime and the beautiful in the legendary ventures of history’s great explorers

February 1, 2012 In her new collection, Tales of the New World, Sabina Murray imagines the minds and hearts of a broad variety of legendary explorers and adventurers, investigating the complex and problematic nature of the urge “to go where no man has gone before.” In prose that is at once fearlessly blunt and stylishly ethereal, Murray recreates the triumphs and tragedies of a cast ranging from Ferdinand Magellan to cult leader Jim Jones. Murray will read from and discuss her work on February 6 at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. The event is free and open to the public.

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A Complex Creation

In his new novel, Alan Lightman takes on the beginning of everything

January 30, 2012 Science and faith seem to be continually at war in American culture, with both sides claiming exclusive hold on the truth. In Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, Memphis native Alan Lightman seeks to reconcile the two, respecting both reasoned inquiry and spiritual mystery.

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Beginning with a Voice

It’s been a long road to publication for Thomas P. Balázs, but his new story collection is well worth the wait

January 26, 2012 Despite the science-fiction origin of its title, the nine stories in Thomas P. Balázs’s debut collection, Omicron Ceti III, offer journeys into dark and quite disparate corners of this very real world. Wide-ranging in subject, the stories are linked by their characters’ fumbling, consuming desire for connection, and by the comic qualities that Balázs deftly draws out of their lonely and sometimes painful circumstances. Balázs will read from Omicron Ceti III in Chattanooga on January 29, 3 p.m., at Winder Binder Books, and on February 20, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Federation.

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Family Drama and Unfinished Romance

Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, talks with Chapter 16 about her new book, The Lake of Dreams

January 25, 2012 Kim Edwards’s debut novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, sold more than four million copies in the United States alone and spent 122 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Edwards answered questions from Chapter 16 prior to her appearance at “Literacy is Key: A Book & Author Affair” on January 26 at 10 a.m. at the University of Memphis. The program will also feature remarks by Lisa Patton, author of Yankee Doodle Dixie, and Ace Atkins, author of The Ranger, and proceeds will support both Literacy Mid-South and Reading is Fundamental. For information and tickets, please click here.

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Finding a Place in the Light

Novelist Marianne Wiggins talks with Chapter 16 about her Oak Ridge novel—and how the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was part of its genesis

January 20, 2012 Marianne Wiggins spent five years researching Evidence of Things Unseen. Set in East Tennessee, the novel is an epic love story, a mystery, a passionate argument against technological advances made at the cost of human lives—and the reason the Friends of Knox County Public Library will host an Evening with Marianne Wiggins on January 24. Wiggins will give a free public talk at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville in a celebration of the joint 125th anniversary of the Knox County Public Library and the Knoxville News Sentinel. In an interview prior to the event, she talked about history, causality, and how the time she spent in hiding with her then-husband Salman Rushdie in the 1980s influenced her book about East Tennessee between the world wars.

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