Fiction | Chapter 16

Savage Lunacy, Comical Rage

Wells Tower talks with Chapter 16 about the tensions between fiction and journalism, his recent collaboration with painter John Currin, and his real opinion of chitlins

By Ed Tarkington | January 5, 2012

January 5, 2012 In 2009, Wells Tower exploded onto the American literary landscape with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, one of the most widely acclaimed debut short-story collections in recent memory. With quirky characters ranging from downtrodden real-estate speculators and Gulf Coast aquarium enthusiasts to lovelorn carnival hands and pillaging medieval Vikings, Everything Ravaged dazzles with the delightful oddity of its settings and especially with Tower’s relentlessly inventive prose. His most recent work includes a series of scathingly satirical short-short stories written for a new coffee-table book of paintings by John Currin. Wells Tower will read from his work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 12, 2012.

The Triumph of Rationality

Michael Sims introduces a fascinating cast of Victorian detectives—both real and imagined

By Tina LoTufo | January 4, 2012

January 4, 2012 Michael Sims’s new collection of Victorian detective stories, The Dead Witness, is a cornucopia of dastardly delights and surprises. Watching the characters patiently unravel knots and ingeniously solve puzzles provides the delight. The surprises are the depth and breadth of variety represented in Sims’s overview of the genre. Humor and pathos, moralism and mercy, parody and tragedy, horror and retribution—the full spectrum of the human psyche is on display in this collection. The international cast of characters features authors and protagonists alike from England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. They include a mild-mannered Catholic priest and a tough-talking Virginian, a folksy Canadian tracker and a wide-eyed teenaged boy, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, a blind man, a Musketeer, a bumbler, a dilettante, and, of course, that curiously observant Englishman with a penchant for violins and opium.

Annus Mirabilis

With the launch of both a bestselling novel and the most widely-hailed new bookstore in the country, Ann Patchett has had a year of wonders indeed

By Margaret Renkl | December 16, 2011

December 16, 2011 Last June Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes were only in the earliest planning stages of their new bookstore—which didn’t yet have a location, a staff, or even a name—when Patchett left on a book tour to promote her new novel, State of Wonder. Clearly the store, more a hope and a dream than anything resembling a place of business, was in no way ready to be the subject of a national media blitz, but the timing couldn’t be helped: free publicity is something no independent bookstore is in a position to turn down. According to Patchett’s account in an interview with Chapter 16, she asked Hayes, “Do you want me to talk about this on book tour? I’m going to be doing this media-heavy moment.” Truer words were never spoken.

“A Page from Chekhov’s Playbook”

This year, Adam Ross’s Ladies and Gentlemen had critics comparing him to the most celebrated practitioners of storytelling

By Margaret Renkl | December 12, 2011

December 12, 2011 Critics like to compare Nashville novelist Adam Ross to other writers, and not to your average, everyday, ordinary writers, either. Perhaps it’s inevitable that Ross, who is the author of Mr. Peanut (Knopf, 2010) and Ladies and Gentlemen (Knopf, 2011), should inspire the loftiest comparisons, for how often does a debut novelist rack up outrageous accolades in both translation and across the entire English-speaking world, including on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and then turn in an equally compelling performance with a short-story collection barely a year later? Chapter 16 takes a tour of Ross’s reviews this time around.

Dictated by Daemons

Madison Smartt Bell’s The Color of Night provoked and enthralled the critics

By Maria Browning | December 7, 2011

December 7, 2011 With his novels about both the Haitian Revolution and the Confederate anti-hero Nathan Bedford Forrest, Madison Smartt Bell made an art of writing about violence. His latest novel, The Color of Night, takes that art to a new level with its depiction of a solitary, unrepentant killer who happens to be a woman. The book provoked controversy for its subject matter and for Bell’s unusual creative process. Today Chapter 16 offers a roundup of the discussion, including Bell’s own thoughts about his work.

"Completely in Control of His Entrancing Narrative"

Chapter 16 surveys the critical rhapsodies for Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang

By Margaret Renkl | December 2, 2011

December 2, 2011 The story of two performance artists, Camille and Caleb Fang, and their adult-but-dysfunctional children, Annie and Buster, Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang is at once a family drama, a series of laugh-out-loud set pieces that parody the self-involvement of artists, a scathing indictment of the culture of celebrity, and a deeply moving examination of the ways in which our families shape (and warp) us. Critics quickly lined up behind the book, which promptly became a New York Times bestseller and ended up in the movie-making hands of Nicole Kidman. No wonder The Guardian called it “an experience, rather than a mere read.” Today Chapter 16 sums up the critical response to Kevin Wilson’s smash hit.

Tias and Primas: On Knowing and Loving the Women Who Raise Us

By Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, illustrated by Josie Del Castillo
Seal Press
304 pages
$30

“Within these pages, I found my abuela, my tías and my primas — laughing, crying, and nodding alongside me. This book is a gift of understanding, and loving one’s family, even when our families are complicated and painful. It’s a beautiful reminder of the power of storytelling and the profound connection of kinship.”

~ Paola Mendoza, author, organizer and filmmaker