Fiction | Chapter 16

A Surveyor in the Back of Beyond

Ron Rash’s Something Rich and Strange reveals a master storyteller charting his terrain

By Emily Choate | October 28, 2014

October 28, 2014 Ron Rash has achieved wide recognition as a masterful craftsperson, and Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories will seal that reputation. This collection, drawn from more than twenty years of stories set in the Southern Appalachians, confirms Rash as that landscape’s foremost literary mapmaker and guide. Ron Rash will discuss Something Rich and Strange at The Skillery in Nashville on November 4, 2014, at 6:30 p.m.

Mother Love

In her latest novel, The Midwife, Jolina Petersheim ponders what it means to be a mother

By Faye Jones | October 23, 2014

October 23, 2014 In Dry Hollow, Tennessee, Hopen Haus takes in unwed pregnant women, and head midwife Rhoda Mummau struggles to provide the best care for them even as she keeps the whole Mennonite community at arm’s length to protect a secret from her own past. For her new novel, The Midwife, Jolina Petersheim taps her Mennonite heritage to consider the question of what exactly makes a woman a mother.

My (Fictional) Home

I learned to be a serious novelist when I moved to Tennessee

By Tasha Alexander | October 20, 2014

October 20, 2014 After college, I moved a dozen times—from Indiana to New Jersey, Wyoming, Vermont, Connecticut, and Tennessee—before settling in Chicago. Each of these places etched themselves on my psyche, but Nashville, with its fruit tea, tangy barbeque, and hot chicken, was the place where I learned to be a writer.

River of Glass

October 16, 2014

”In Terrell’s solid third Jared McKean mystery, the Nashville PI takes on a case with an unexpected family connection. When Khanh, a scarred Vietnamese woman around his age, shows up one day at his door, claiming to be his half-sister, Jared is forced to concede that his soldier father may have had a second family overseas . . . In addition to the story’s emotional rewards, Terrell offers insights into the mechanics of domination and submission.”

–Publishers Weekly

Each Shining Hour

October 16, 2014

“A young doctor, marking time until he can leave a somnolent farm town for the bustle of a big city, finds more excitement in Watervalley than he bargained for…Each Shining Hour kept me reading far into the night hours!”

–Ann B. Ross, author of the Miss Julia Novels

Prosperity

October 16, 2014

“Police Lieutenant Robert O’Brian takes early retirement after being shot in a drug raid. His plans–to return to his home town Prosperity in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee to work on a second novel–are disrupted when he becomes involved in the investigation of the death of a high school friend.”

–From the Publisher

Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

By Tore C. Olsson
St. Martin's Press
288 pages
$30

“I recommend Red Dead’s History unreservedly not only to fans of the iconic video game, but also to anyone who wants to understand the riotousness — from Wild West gunslingers to Jim Crow to lynching — that darkened our past, and which continues to influence our culture. Olsson’s prose is graceful, his analysis profound. This is history at its most accessible and exciting.”

~Peter Cozzens, award-winning author of A Brutal Reckoning