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1 week ago | 
chapter16.org | Erica Wright |Sean Kinch |Lee Conell |Ed Tarkington
In her new story collection Hellions, Julia Elliott embraces the grotesque, playing with a rich literary tradition and molding it into something wholly her own. These tales teem with supernatural creatures — demons, hags, changelings, and swamp apes — but it’s the humans who are most compelling. Hellions opens with “Bride” in which the nun Wilda flagellates and starves herself to purge her body of sin, specifically lust.
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3 weeks ago | 
chapter16.org | Sara West |Steve Haruch |Ed Tarkington |Sarah Norris
Ask anyone what defines Southern literature, and the answer is likely to include the importance of place – the land from which our stories spring. But for years now, I’ve wrestled with how many stories have been excluded from this regional designation, how many people have lived just as fully off the land even as they were denied the right to call that land their own. Memphis native Dolen Perkins-Valdez knows this disconnect.
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1 month ago | 
chapter16.org | Cat Acree |Emily Choate |Ed Tarkington |Maria Browning
In On Freedom, Yale historian Timothy Snyder describes going to Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Sitting in the back of a friend’s car, looking over the coast of the Black Sea from Ukraine’s Kherson region, he describes filling the trunk of the car with watermelons gifted by farmers who de-mined their own fields with improvised equipment. Snyder and his friend would later give the watermelons away in Kyiv.
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2 months ago | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Ed Tarkington |Kashif Andrew Graham |Clay Risen
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review was originally published on September 5, 2018. ***The young woman and the old man shared clingstone peaches. She brought him a Virginia ham and a ripe watermelon. Once they feasted on a “marvelous mess of blue crabs.” When the old man felt like it, he told her stories of his life—of Africa, of the Middle Passage, of slavery and freedom, of resilience and heartache. Nearly a century later, we have Barracoon, his remarkable and painful memoir.
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2 months ago | 
chapter16.org | Cat Acree |Ed Tarkington |Chris Scott |Maria Browning
In the firm hands of Catherine Coleman Flowers, environmental, social, and racial justice aren’t separate strands of work that must be done, but rather parts of a whole that stretches back generations. Her essay collection, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, reveals an activist who knows what it takes to get things done.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
chapter16.org | Ed Tarkington
Over the last two decades, Elizabeth Strout has quietly joined an increasingly exclusive club: literary writers whose work is both critically lauded and enormously popular. Her achievement is all the more remarkable for the fact that her most popular novels and story collections are all set in small, remote New England towns and follow the lives of quiet, taciturn, outwardly unremarkable people.
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Aug 31, 2024 | 
timesfreepress.com | Ed Tarkington
Advertisement Advertisement Review: ‘There Is Happiness’ offers bittersweet confirmation of Brad Watson’s storytelling genius Today at 12:00 p.m. by Ed Tarkington / Chapter16.org W.W. Norton / "There Is Happiness" "THERE IS HAPPINESS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES" by Brad Watson (W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $30). It's been four years since the unexpected passing of Brad Watson, from cardiac arrest at his home in Wyoming.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
chapter16.org | Ed Tarkington
It’s been four years since the unexpected passing of Brad Watson, from cardiac arrest at his home in Wyoming. One of the most gifted and underappreciated American fiction writers of the last half-century, Brad was a master of style and form, but he was also a terrific storyteller and just plain fun to read. Inventive and unpredictable, Watson’s work covers the full spectrum of human experience, from comic absurdity to profound pathos and everything in between.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
timesfreepress.com | Ed Tarkington
"SHAE" by Mesha Maren (Algonquin, 224 pages, $27). Mesha Maren's new novel, "Shae," begins with the title character's dubious memory of the beginning of star-crossed love. Shae's recollection conflicts with her former lover Cam's. "I thought it meant something deeply bad, the fact that we don't remember it the same way," Shae says. "But sometimes now I picture Cam's version and it feels more real.
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May 20, 2024 | 
chapter16.org | Ed Tarkington |Maria Browning
Mesha Maren’s new novel Shae begins with the title character’s dubious memory of the beginning of star-crossed love. Shae’s recollection conflicts with her former lover Cam’s. “I thought it meant something deeply bad, the fact that we don’t remember it the same way,” Shae says. “But sometimes now I picture Cam’s version and it feels more real.
