Frank Wynne, chair of this year’s Booker judges, noted that translating ‘Tomb of Sand’ presented “huge challenges” because the novel is about words, language and storytelling, not just characters and plot. Another judge added that it is “safe to say this [novel] is like nothing else you have ever read.”
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Mom’s Still In Bed: Mona Simpson on family, fate and mental illness
Mona Simpson’s latest novel unfurls into a stirring cartography of the impacts of a mother’s deteriorating mental health on her three children.
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Review: An inner-city Boston parish’s lessons for building a vibrant church community
‘People Get Ready’ tells how an inner-city Boston parish managed to transform itself into a vibrant church community, an experience that Reynolds believes holds lessons for a new understanding of the role of the parish in Catholic ecclesiology.
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Review: An LGBT scholar’s memoir on growing up Catholic
In his new memoir, a noted scholar of L.G.B.T. history describes a world of extended family, Catholic schools and parish life that offered a relatively safe space for him to discover himself as a politically progressive gay man.
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Review: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological vision of the Eucharist, heaven and a Christ-centered anthropology
Jonathan Ciraulo claims that “Balthasar’s theology as a whole is concerned, one could say consumed, with making the Eucharist the linchpin for all speculative dogmatics.” It is worth considering the ramifications of this view in four crucial areas of theology: Christology, theological anthropology, Trinitarian theology and eschatology.
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Remembering Martin Amis: literary bad boy—and an unexpected moralist
Martin Amis leaves behind a remarkable corpus of fiction, essays and memoir—even if he could be eminently dislikable.
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Review: Life and death, reconsidered
In ‘Sister Death,’ Beatrice Marovich explores the connections between living and dying in a way that seeks to refute the concept of death as enemy while not accepting it as something that is good or desirable.
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Vatican II: Rupture or reform?
George Weigel’s new book, ‘To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II,’ is a defense of the council against those who think it created a rupture with tradition (for better or for worse).
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Review: Faith and activism in the City of Angels
‘City of Dignity,’ by Sean T. Dempsey, S.J., tells a story of how progressive religious leaders, organizations and institutions worked to shape Los Angeles into a city where dignity flourished through their grassroots organizing and activism in the decades after World War II until the mid-1990s.
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Review: Violence and hospitality in a seaside town
In ‘Vigil Harbor,’ Julia Glass shares a complex tale about a town’s history of close encounters with violence, but also about the open and helpful community that unintentionally enables some of the calamities that ensue.