For James Joyce, humanity’s faulty condition “is happy because faults, errors, mistakes and misunderstandings” are the birth of comedy, writes Gabrielle Carey in a new biography.
Joshua Hren
Joshua Hren is founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA at the University of St. Thomas. Joshua’s books include: the novel Infinite Regress; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; Contemplative Realism and Blue Walls Falling Down: A Novel (October of 2024).
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The ghosts of James Joyce in Edward P. Jones’s writing
Both Joyce’s and Jones’s stories move us through tragic epiphanies that leave the soul, pained by paralysis, on the threshold of conversion.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Jesuit influence in David Foster Wallace’s final, unfinished novel
David Foster Wallace’s novella ‘Something to Do With Paying Attention’ features two conversion narratives, a “fearful Jesuit” and “the death of childhood’s limitless possibility.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Dana Gioia’s love letter to teachers and mentors
Dana Gioia’s new book is a love letter attesting to the illuminating and poetic moments of his education.
Posted inArts & Culture, Features
Caroline Gordon, the Catholic novelist we lost and found
Caroline Gordon’s ‘The Malefactors,’ a novel lost to prospective generations of readers, was a classic Catholic tale told by an author of considerable talent.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
What Evelyn Waugh saw in America (An Anglo-American romance)
Noted for his acid tongue, Evelyn Waugh hated the United States and its citizens and let them know it. However, he felt more and more drawn to them on repeated visits.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
For those on death row, redemption of souls is what matters most
Regardless of where one stands on the death penalty, however, all Catholics must not lose sight of the souls on death row who await the judgment that state-enforced terminations will quicken.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Can Catholic literature build on its rich heritage?
A Catholic literary culture that works in continuity with its rich heritage will give us a contemporary literature that both gazes unflinchingly at the messiness of our present moment and artfully works out its characters’ salvation or damnation.