Fiction | Chapter 16

Rushing Ahead

Sorority recruitment proves to be an unlikely catalyst for change in Lisa Patton’s Rush

By Kathryn Justice Leache | August 15, 2018

Lisa Patton’s Rush is a deep dive into sorority culture and a powerful treatise on the importance of extricating what’s genuinely valuable from a matrix of history, tradition, and social torpor-and leaving the rest. Patton will appear at Novel in Memphis on August 21, at Books-A-Million in Jackson on August 22, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 23, at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on September 20, and at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

A Time of War and Treachery

Brenda Rickman Vantrease takes readers back to the Civil War—the English one

By Faye Jones | August 13, 2018

In Brenda Rickman Vantrease’s new novel, The Queen’s Promise, three women must make dangerous choices as England collapses into civil war. Vantrease will appear at Parnassus Books on August 19, and at the Southern Festival of Books, held October 12-14. Both events are in Nashville.

Right Ho, Penelope

In Penelope Lemon: Game On!, Inman Majors summons the comic spirit of P.G. Wodehouse

By Sean Kinch | August 7, 2018

The hero of Inman Majors’s new comic novel, Penelope Lemon: Game On!, is at a crossroads. Divorced and broke, she must use all her cunning and fortitude to start over—and maybe have some fun along the way. Majors will appear at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on August 13, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on August 14, at Novel in Memphis on August 16, and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

Let the Ruin Come Down

In Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson plumbs the tragicomic depths of misbegotten lives

By Ed Tarkington | August 6, 2018

A widow welcomes home her drug-addicted son after the demise of his rock band. A single mother tries to talk her son out of dressing up for Halloween as his dead brother. A chain-smoking priest attempts to cure an altar boy who faints during Communion. With the stories in Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Sewanee fiction writer Kevin Wilson continues his tragicomic exploration of the dark side of domesticity.

Home to Ackerman’s Field

The Lost Country, a new posthumously published novel, is classic William Gay

By Clay Risen | August 1, 2018

William Gay’s writing doesn’t capture Middle Tennessee; it is Middle Tennessee, as much a part of the landscape as its fields and barns and creeks. Every turn of phrase, every scene describes with effortless perfection the curve of a hill, the angle of an eave, the lilt in a drawl.

Let the Truth Show Itself in the Work

Chapter 16 talks with James McBride, author of the 2016 Nashville Reads selection, The Color of Water

By Ed Tarkington | July 11, 2018

Nearly twenty years have passed since the publication of James McBride’s first book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. The memoir spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and continues to be a regular selection for city-wide programs.

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

By Allen Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Routledge
340 pages
$180

The book “explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book.”

~the publisher