Fiction | Chapter 16

Still Discovering

By Ed Tarkington

January 13, 2012

January 12, 2012 Since her auspicious debut at age twenty-eight with the short-story collection Self-Help, Lorrie Moore has become one of America’s most revered and imitated authors of literary fiction. The recipient of countless awards and honors, including the International Fiction Prize for Birds of America, Moore is among the most influential practitioners of the short-story form. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Lorrie Moore will appear at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on January 19 at 4:30 p.m. She answered questions from Chapter 16 via email prior to the event.

Savage Lunacy, Comical Rage

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

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

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”

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

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.