Maria Browning

3 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Long before Martha S. Jones wrote The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, she was a young woman worried about her birth certificate. At 19, Jones wanted to study abroad. She’d need a passport, of course, and that meant digging her birth certificate out of the family’s fireproof strongbox tucked in a dark corner of her mom’s bedroom. Finding it, she saw a word that confounded what she knew about herself. That word was “white.”“My heart raced as I frantically scanned the paper,” Jones writes.

3 weeks ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Like a Southern summer, Girls with Long Shadows may appear at first glance to be a sweet and easy tale. At a distance, the novel’s main characters — the 19-year-old identical Binderup triplets — resemble archetypal Southern beauties: tall and thin, blonde and blue-eyed. They tend to their grandmother’s golf course in their bikinis, say “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

Hear the name William Faulkner and you think of his work. Short stories like “Barn Burning” or long ones like “The Bear,” such novels as The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! The tangled prose, those thorny truths. And his greatest creation, a small world as real to us as the dirt under our feet, the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Yet the work wasn’t enough. It never is. When we’re fascinated by the art, we must find out all we can of the artist.

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

I told a friend about an argument we had in the library while designing some bookmarks. One staff member kept wanting to add information. “We have more information than bookmark,” a frustrated colleague said. “Then make the bookmark bigger,” snapped the annoyed staff member. My friend was more puzzled than amused as I described a proposed bookmark larger than any book. “Who uses bookmarks anymore?” she asked.

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Maria Browning

“Tennessee” is derived from the Cherokee noun Ta-Nas-Ce, “river with a big bend,” which could allude to scores of streams and meanders in the state’s watershed but likely refers to a bend and village along the Little Tennessee River in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.