Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Where Music and Sports Converge

Chuck Klosterman flexes his singular voice in a new nonfiction collection

Chuck Klosterman X collects some of the journalist’s writing about sports, music, and topics as disparate as zombies and steroids in a book the subtitle describes as “A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century.” Klosterman will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. on May 23.

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“Once His Country’s Idol, Now Her Horror”

Nathaniel Philbrick examines the life and treason of Benedict Arnold

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution is a grand adventure into the darkness of the human heart, the story of a man whose name is synonymous with “traitor.” Philbrick will discuss and sign Valiant Ambition at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 16 at 7 p.m.

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Funny Business

Peter Cooper writes of secrets, legends, and laughs in Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride

Peter Cooper—Nashville music critic, singer, and senior director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum—relates some of his greatest musical adventures in Johnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride. Cooper will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 16 at 6:30 p.m. and at The Station Inn in Nashville on May 26 at 8 p.m.

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Kaleidoscopic

Coming in 2018 from Vanderbilt University Press: People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley

When Jim Ridley died last year at age fifty, he left a legacy of brilliant writing about movies, literature, music, art, and the vibrant life of a growing city. Celebrating that achievement, Vanderbilt University Press has just announced that it will publish an anthology of the late Nashville Scene editor’s most memorable film reviews. Today Chapter 16 talks with Steve Haruch, editor of People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley.

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Not On Our Watch

How the National Endowment for the Humanities helped save literature in Tennessee

With the White House proposing to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, Chapter 16’s editor looks back at a time when NEH funds rescued writers in Tennessee.

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The March of Science

In The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell writes with a poet’s ear and a biologist’s precision

In his 2012 book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, David George Haskell revealed the web of life hidden within a small circle of old-growth Tennessee forest. His second book, The Songs of Trees, expands that web to the globe itself. Haskell will appear at Parnassus Books in Nashville on April 30 at 2 p.m.

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