A Publication of Humanities Tennessee

Now in Print

July 26, 2011 Published as an Amazon ebook in April 2010, D.B. Henson’s mystery, Deed to Death, proved phenomenally successful. By word of tweet, Facebook, blog, and online review, the debut novel sold 100,000 copies and made the Best of 2010 Kindle Customer Favorites list, which includes the likes of Stieg Larson and Laura Lippman. The Nashville author’s success got the attention of uber-agent Noah Lukeman, who offered to represent her. He sold Deed to Death to Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone Books, and the rest is … well, you know the rest. Henson will sign Deed to Death on July 30 at 2 p.m. at Mysteries & More in Nashville. She will also appear at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 14-16.

Now in Print

Hidden Costs

July 22, 2011 In Silver Sparrow, the third novel from Tayari Jones, a girl named Dana Lynn Yarboro grows up a captive to her parents’ secrets: her father, James Witherspoon, who is married to her mother, has another wife and daughter. From an early age, Dana learns what it means to be an “outside child,” forbidden to tell anyone of her real father. But over time her desire to know her sister, and her desire to be known, gets the best of her, and she begins to pick away at the thin membrane of secrecy that keeps the girls apart. Set in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow is a thoughtful story about bigamy, but it is also a lovely, realistic portrait of two teenage African-American girls, and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Tayari Jones will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

The Uses for Freedom

July 20, 2011 Acclaimed novelist Reynolds Price died on January 20, 2011. Six months later, Robert Cheatham, president of Humanities Tennessee, recalls his former college professor and friend of nearly fifty years and introduces Chapter 16’s publication of an interview he conducted with Price in the 1991 issue of Touchstone magazine. Owing in part to the controversy surrounding a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, their conversation—titled “Censorship, Literature, & Public Education”—focused on the issues of sex and censorship and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.

Soaking Up the Voices

July 15, 2011 A Lee Martin novel combines the fast pacing and suspense of a thriller with the craftsmanship and lyricism of literary fiction. One of Martin’s chief tactics is the drawn-out reveal: his characters cling to their secrets as long as they can, unburdening themselves slowly, layer by layer. In Martin’s fiction, revelation can lead to punishment (prison, retribution, outcasting), but it also, almost always, leads to freedom. We are only as sick, his fiction argues, as our secrets. Lee Martin will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville. Today he talks with Chapter 16 about his work.

Soaking Up the Voices

High-Country Song

July 14, 2011 Joe Henry has made a career of his gift for penning unforgettable lyrics. He has worked with a variety of artists in multiple genres, from Vince Gill and Garth Brooks to John Denver and Burt Bacharach, and his songs have been recorded by artists as disparate as Frank Sinatra and Rascal Flatts. In Lime Creek, his debut work of fiction, Henry translates his gift for the transcendent insight and the unforgettable turn of phrase into an extended meditation on the lives of a ranching family in the high country of the mountain West.

Old Hickory’s Revenge

July 12, 2011 For the first time, international best-selling author Steve Berry has set one of his Cotton Malone thrillers in the United States, and it has a Tennessee connection. When Malone sets out to defeat a band of modern-day pirates, he must first decipher a clue left by Andrew Jackson. The Jefferson Key opens with an attack on Old Hickory and rushes at breakneck speed through some of the dimmer recesses of American history, delivering an extra-large order of conspiracy, double-crosses, and wild action.

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