Q&A

Anyone who relies on the airline industry to get where they need to go can tell stories about delays, cancellations, shrinking storage space, and general dissatisfaction with the entire process. Vanderbilt University professor Ganesh Sitaraman spells out the remedy for this state of affairs in Why Flying Is Miserable and How to Fix It.

In his new science fiction novel, Message in the Sky, Nashville author John Minichillo offers a satirical gateway to notions that defy simplistic classification.

In Social Justice from Outside the Walls, Ann Youngblood Mulhearn tells the story of six Catholic women — three Black, three white — whose activism changed Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s. An engaging and well-told book, it combines religious, political, and African American history to add a key dimension to a city that stood at the heart of the struggle for social justice.  

Angela Sutton’s Pirates of the Slave Trade weaves together biographies of fascinating figures, tales of maritime warfare, and analyses of politics and power in Europe and West Africa — with implications for the system of slavery that shaped the United States.

In Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, Danielle Chapman grapples with the meaning of her Middle Tennessee ancestry and military forbears, including a Confederate second-great grandfather. Chapman will appear at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis on March 17, Rhodes College on March 18, and Middle Tennessee State University on March 19.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: A National Book Award Finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, The Yellow Birds by Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers has been hailed by a host of literary luminaries as an instant classic. Written in lyrical prose that veers between terse understatement and vivid figurative language, The Yellow Birds is a rich literary experience as well as a harrowing narrative about the effects of war on both soldiers and families.