Fiction | Chapter 16

Anguish and Anticipation

Bestselling novelist Amy Greene describes the torture of waiting for a book to be published

By Amy Greene | March 28, 2011

March 28, 2011 Waiting for my first novel to be released was a little bit like torture, and I could almost believe that getting a book deal had been a dream. In the three years between the day my agent sold the book and the day it was officially published, there were two rounds of edits, followed by copyediting, then proofreading, and, finally, months of behind-the-scenes production and marketing that had nothing to do with me. After years of blood, sweat, and tears, my novel was out of my hands. Bloodroot would have a life of its own, and all I could do was watch.

Victoria's Other Secret

Michael Sims peeks beneath the petticoats of nineteenth-century detective fiction

By Faye Jones | March 16, 2011

March 16, 2011 The Victorians were a resourceful group: once they realized how absolutely engrossing readers found crime stories, they invented lady detectives, though the actual gumshoes of the age were uniformly male. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has collected a fascinating group of Victorian stories featuring female detectives and offers an intriguing analysis of these ancestors of Miss Marple. Sims will discuss The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime on March 19 at 1 p.m. at BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville.

Making the Words Disappear

Richard Bausch talks with Chapter 16 about the art of fiction

By Maria Browning | March 15, 2011

March 15, 2011 Richard Bausch has won wide acclaim for his eleven novels and is regarded as a master of the contemporary short story. He talks with Chapter 16 about his newest collection of stories, Something is Out There (out next month in paperback), and about his own approach to the art of fiction. Bausch, who holds the Moss Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis, will appear at the sixteenth Biennial Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga April 14-16.

Digging Up Evil

Jefferson Bass’s sixth Body Farm novel excavates unpleasant truths

By Chris Scott | March 14, 2011

March 14, 2011 Jefferson Bass (a pseudonym for the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass) has mined the unfortunately rich history of true crime to inspire another fictional adventure of Bill Brockton, the alter ego of Bill Bass himself, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist. This time the story is a fictional retelling of the very real, horrific history of a Florida reform school, and The Bone Yard is the darkest outing yet for Brockton and his fellow forensic experts. The Jefferson Bass team will discuss the book at locations in Oak Ridge, Knoxville, Farragut, Athens, and Maryville. Check Chapter 16’s events page, here, for details.

Dissecting Bluff City

A serial killer cuts a swath through Memphis in A. Scott Pearson’s second medical thriller

By Chris Scott | March 9, 2011

March 9, 2011 Nashville surgeon A. Scott Pearson has followed up his first medical thriller with a second outing for his alter ego, Dr. Eli Branch. In Public Anatomy, space-age surgical technology meets sixteenth-century medical art in a story of murder and mayhem in Memphis. Pearson will introduce and sign Public Anatomy at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on March 9, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on March 19, and at Mysteries & More in Nashville on March 26.

Diving In

Sara J. Henry’s protagonist rescues a drowning child—and finds herself in a world of mystery

By Sam Moxley | March 8, 2011

March 8, 2011 When Troy Chance sees a small child being thrown from a ferry into Lake Champlain, she immediately dives into the water to rescue him. The search for his family—and, later, for his kidnappers—sets off the whirlwind plot of Oak Ridge native Sara J. Henry’s debut novel, Learning to Swim. Henry will read from and sign copies of the book at 7 p.m. on March 10 at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood.

Tender Headed (National Poetry Series)

By Olatunde Osinaike
Akashic Books
80 pages
17.95

“In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language.”

~ Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses