Thomas Pynchon is best-known as the reclusive author of some of our most famous postmodern novels. But is he also a discerning judge of our spiritual health?
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Sally Rooney’s ‘Intermezzo’ is occasionally interesting, frequently frustrating and ultimately insufficient
Rooney’s novel ends up as an overlong interlude, poised between significant moments, not substantial enough to compose its own movement.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Movie Club
Wim Wenders’s ‘Perfect Days’ finds joy in the most mundane of tasks
A public toilet cleaner who lives alone, Hirayama has discovered deep meaning and beauty in a life that others would demean or reject.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Garth Greenwell’s mystical novel ‘Small Rain’ teaches the art of living from a hospital bed
Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain is a mystical novel, a story in which illness becomes an occasion for a new attention to one’s life and loves.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
John Fante: the almost-forgotten scribe of Los Angeles
John Fante’s fiction depicted Los Angeles through a penetrating, panoramic gaze—and anticipated the rise of the Beats in American literature.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
The 2024 Emmys brought TV showbiz back
Jokes were cracked; records were shattered. If you wanted an award show to remind you why you watch television, you got one.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Forgiving and forgetting (or not) in ‘The Bear’
Forgiveness and the need to be forgiven are prominent themes in “The Bear,“ the Emmy-Award-winning show starring Jeremy Allen White.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Movie Club
Where is God in school shootings? ‘Mass’ doesn’t offer easy answers.
By focusing on parental grief, “Mass” grounds us in human tragedy even as it touches on the political and social implications of the epidemic of school shootings in the United States.
Posted inArts & Culture, Interviews
Interview: Colm Tóibín on ‘Long Island,’ sequel-writing and the delight of a Costco chicken
Colm Tóibín’s new novel, ‘Long Island,’ is a sequel to perhaps his best-known book, ‘Brooklyn.’ What was it like to take up the story again two decades later? He tells us in this interview with America.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Martyrs for the earth
In ‘Ecomartyrdom in the Americas: Living and Dying for Our Common Home,’ Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo invites us to look carefully at the lives of modern ecomartyrs as a guide to help us “re-imagine and re-embody the relationship between human beings and the earth.”