Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Hot Time in the City

Hermione Hoby’s Neon in Daylight is set during an endless NYC heat wave

For the young protagonist of Hermione Hoby’s debut novel, Neon in Daylight, an alcoholic writer and his danger-seeking daughter lend an alluring glamor to a sweltering Manhattan summer. Hoby will discuss Neon in Daylight at Parnassus Books in Nashville on February 1 at 6:30 p.m.

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After Tragedy

Two men’s lives are forever changed in Steve Yarbrough’s The Unmade World

The paths of two very different men intersect in Steve Yarbrough’s The Unmade World, and both lives are changed forever. This tale of entwined fates becomes a meditation on guilt, innocence, and ordinary injustice, as well as a story about how we seek meaning even in the face of life’s most baffling cruelties.

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No Place Like Home

Barry Wolverton returns with the third volume in his adventure series for young readers

In The Sea of the Dead, Volume III of the Chronicles of the Black Tulip, Memphis author Barry Wolverton fills his whirlwind of an adventure story with the non-stop action and fantastic magical elements young readers have come to expect.

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Death-Defying Feats

Four siblings reckon with a fortune teller’s prophecy in Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists

In Chloe Benjamin’s dazzling new novel, four siblings set down an uneasy path after a fortune teller reveals the dates on which each one of them will die. Benjamin will discuss The Immortalists at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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Suffused with Color and Light and Personality

The Afterlives is a departure for Thomas Pierce

At the age of thirty-three, Jim Byrd suffers a cardiac arrest but is resuscitated after being clinically dead. Afterward, he’s fine—except that he can’t recall any sense of an afterlife, any glow at the end of a tunnel. Thomas Pierce will read from his debut novel, The Afterlives, at Parnassus Books in Nashville on January 20.

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Setting Fire to Jim Crow

In his latest satiric novel, Gerald Duff skewers the vestiges of antebellum Nashville

Starting from an actual 1967 forum featuring South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Martin Luther King Jr., activist Stokely Carmichael, and beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Gerald Duff’s Nashville Burning looks at three consecutive Aprils of violence and change at Vanderbilt and other parts of the Music City.

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