Shehan Karunatilaka’s new novel echoes elements of several all-time classics, including ‘The Divine Comedy,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and almost everything by Kurt Vonnegut, whose voice and vision can be felt throughout.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The invitation to everyday holiness found in spiritual memoirs
In ‘Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir,’ Richard Lischer explores classics of “an intimate genre, perhaps the most intimate.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Molly Shannon, of SNL and ‘Superstar’ fame, is the Catholic school girl in all of us
More than the costumes and settings, it is that humanity at the heart of Molly Shannon’s comedy which makes it Catholic to the core.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The return of Cormac McCarthy
‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris,’ Cormac McCarthy’s elegiac, disputatious and deeply odd pair of new novels, offers a typically offbeat take on American culture and society.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: When Botticelli illustrated Dante
With ‘Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance,’ Joseph Luzzi has written a fascinating narrative that tells the story of the drawings and seeks to revise our understanding of the phenomenon traditionally known as the Renaissance.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The apostle to Alcoholics Anonymous
In Dawn Eden Goldstein’s biography of the Rev. Ed Dowling, we encounter a remarkable individual whose intellect, enthusiasm and humility helped Alcoholics Anonymous burgeon into a worldwide haven for spiritual growth for those struggling with addiction.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Irish rebel who wrote ‘the first modern thriller’
Erskine Childers went from being the John le Carré of his day to a convicted war criminal and nationalist martyr.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Bono and Bob Dylan: Two venerable musicians enter the audiobook world
The creative ways audiobooks are being embraced by like Bono or Bob Dylan are creating a new category of content that is different from conventional book publishing.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: A Jesuit cardinal in Roman high society
A new collective tribute by a baker’s dozen of erudite specialists adds up to an erudite, if in some parts abstruse, overview of the remarkable life and ecclesiastic career of Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: James Lee Burke on a paradise lost
In ‘Another Kind of Eden,’ James Lee Burke offers literary speculations on the presence of evil in a fallen world—a post-Eden existence that nonetheless makes occasional stabs at goodness and light.