America’s spring 2022 literary issue has a little bit of something for everyone—including the historian in each of us.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Is it high time to reconsider our drug policies?
A Columbia professor comes clean about his casual drug use—and thinks the rest of us should think more about harm reduction than eradication when it comes to addictive substances.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Christopher Beha left the Catholic church and then came back. Now he’s writing a book about why.
Novelist and editor Christopher Beha discusses faith, writing and great literature with Mary Grace Mangano.
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‘Talking Back to Dante’: A tribute in verse
Writing in honor of Dante and in conversation with him, Angela O’Donnell recognizes the enormous impact his imagination had on our worldview.
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How Catholic Was Gustave Flaubert?
Gustave Flaubert’s prose reflects a lifetime of grappling with religious and spiritual themes. He saw his Catholicism as a singular form of asceticism, allied to his vocation as a writer.
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In an age of insurrections and culture wars, Joyce and Faulkner are increasingly relevant
Faulkner’s Southern twist on Joycean modernism has made for popular reading in the wake of the U.S. Capitol insurrection and other spasms of red-state rage.
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Review: The Pentecost of climate change
Katharine Hayhoe’s new book is a conversational, first-person narrative that melds the social science around climate change attitudes and communication into a framework and set of stories that readers can access and relate to.
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Review: South Africa’s answer to William Faulkner
Using present tense, omniscient point of view and a William Faulkner-like stream-of-consciousness, Damon Galgut takes readers into the heads of every character in his new novel.
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‘How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic’: A guide to crafting authentic, faithful fiction
Does Christian literary expression hover as “something between a dead language and a hangover”? Have Catholic artists “ceded the arts to secular society”? In response to what might be considered a literary call to action comes a new book by Joshua Hren.
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On the road again: William Least Heat-Moon’s ‘Blue Highways’ turns 40
Forty years after its publication, Jon Sweeney revisits ‘Blue Highways’ and its iconoclastic author.