Fiction

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.

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.

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.

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.