Month Day 20XX

Editor's Note

Last Monday, April 15, the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes were announced via streaming video, and I was watching in real time, just in case a Tennessee author got the prize that changes a book's prospects forever. Tennessee has taken home a fair number of Pulitzers over the years — in 2016, in fact,  Chapter 16  ran  a whole series on our winners  in connection with the hundredth anniversary of the prizes — but it's been some time since our last win. In fact, it's been a whole a decade: Chattanooga native and Sewanee alumnus Jon Meacham won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, mere months before the launch of this site. Last Monday, we won again when Townsend, Tennessee, novelist Richard Powers  won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel  The Overstory . When I heard his name, I shouted out, "AEEEIIIEEE!" and burst into tears at the same time. Not just because another Pulitzer Prize was coming to Tennessee but also because this is the novel for our age; a novel that addresses, head on, the greatest challenges we face as a planet. And it does these things not through polemics but though beauty — 500 pages of the most gorgeous prose imaginable — and by way of a story so arresting that I drove straight from the airport to the bookstore once I realized I'd left my copy of the book, only half read, at BNA. As one character in the novel says, "The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story." Richard Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,  The Overstory,  has the potential to change the conversation about climate change, deforestation, and the human connection to nature. Please read it.

Recently at Chapter 16

A Protection Against Oblivion (Review) Lindsey A. Freeman’s unconventional memoir recreates a childhood in the atomic city. By Tina Chambers

Mother is a Circle (Review) Absence haunts Sophia Shalmiyev’s captivating memoir, Mother Winter . By Emily Choate

Revisiting the Movement (Review) Robert Penn Warren’s 1964 interviews with civil-rights activists get an updated look. By Peter Kuryla

Secret Lives (Review) Mania meets narcissism—and murder—in R.J. Jacobs’s debut thriller. By Liz Garrigan

From the Archive

Through the Eyes of a Child (Podcast) By Stephen Usery

Coming Up

Review of Greek to Me by Mary Norris (appearing in conversation with Ann Patchett at the Parthenon in Nashville on 4/28) Review of Southern Lady Code by Helen Ellis (reading at Parnassus Books in Nashville on 4/30) Review of The Mission of a Lifetime by Basil Hero (reading at Novel in Memphis on 4/28) Jennie Fields’s essay on the Rockvale Writers’ Colony in College Grove Q&A with Ann Patchett re Lambslide (reading at Parnassus Books in Nashville on 5/6)

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Humanities TN founded Chapter16.org in 2009 as a response to the loss of local book coverage in newspapers around the state. New stories — primarily book reviews, author interview, and features--appear each weekday on the site. Make a tax-deductible donation to support Chapter 16 's comprehensive coverage of the state's literary news and events.

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