Emily Choate

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.

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Sean Kinch |Maria Browning |Emily Choate |Faye Jones

For a story set amid the darkness and ugliness of World War II, Alice Austen’s 33 Place Brugmann is peculiarly focused on beauty. Set largely in the eponymous Brussels apartment building, this debut novel depicts the struggles of a group of characters for whom art and life are interchangeable. Mere survival doesn’t suffice; they cling to the hope that, when the ravages of war subside, the jewels of civilization will be restored to their pedestals.

2 months ago | chapter16.org | Erica Wright |Robert C Cumming |Humanities Tennessee |Emily Choate

Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee is best known for his novels and screenplays, but a new volume from The Works of James Agee series restores his reputation as a poet. Complete Poetry of James Agee includes the writer’s earliest publication, Permit Me Voyage, as well as the scant number of poems that were published in magazines and journals during Agee’s lifetime.

2 months ago | chapter16.org | Emily Choate |Sean Kinch |Kim Green |Michael Taylor

When novelist Geraldine Brooks received the devastating phone call informing her that her husband of more than 30 years, celebrated nonfiction writer Tony Horwitz, had died unexpectedly while on tour for his latest book, she found herself trapped between warring impulses. “I paced the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest,” she writes in her new memoir, Memorial Days.

Jan 7, 2025 | chapter16.org | Emily Choate |Maria Browning

Near the end of poet Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993, the book’s titular protagonist addresses the “gods of difficult things” and tries to explain her choices. “i’m out there still, foraging / in the threads of the world for a story I like better / than the one I’ve been telling,” Helen says.