Of Many Things
Books beyond imagining: an introduction to America’s 2020 Fall literary issue
Twice a year, America publishes special literary issues devoted in their entirety to the world of literature. In Fall Books 2020, a variety of authors and genres are explored, from fiction to poetry to biography and more.
Features
The startling debut of Raven Leilani
As a high school student in a rigorous art program, she had been drawn to Impressionism. Its tension—between precision and subjectivity, seeing clearly and feeling deeply—marks Leilani’s fiction output.
New beginnings for John Berryman and Robert Giroux
When John Berryman and Robert Giroux met at Columbia University in 1932, they would not have expected to forge a decades-long friendship that would result in over a dozen literary classics.
Books
Curtis Sittenfeld and the art of political fiction
Reality is messier than than fiction that reduces historical figures like Hillary Clinton to the sum of her most oversimplified virtues and vices.
Review: The significant questions of a creative life
Using familiar methods of interpretation, Christopher Pramuk translates stories that illuminate paths to the transcendent when communicated through the arts.
Review: Richard Wagner’s immense influence on music (and history)
Few artists in history have found as many devotees as Richard Wagner, for better or for worse.
Review: The life and works of author Robert Stone
In a new biography of Robert Stone, Madison Smartt Bell argues that Stone’s career involves both the American dream and the search for meaning.
Jean Giono’s mirror of the present
Jean Giono’s narrators are often grounded in a kind of eternal present, where the coach will always run and a certain tree will always stand, moving us by degrees into the uneasy past of narrative.
She was Paris’s most famous courtesan. Then she found God.
For Liane de Pougy life was a banquet, and she took seconds of every dish.
The must-read novel for quarantine and social distancing is about a 17th-century plague
Published in 2002, ‘Year of Wonders’ is set in a 17th-century English plague town.
Poetry
Fall Moon
It’s getting late. The more time flows the icier its scars.
In Closing
quiet shuts the door and silence makes room
Last Take
No, the Catholic intellectual tradition is not a thing of the past.
The five most memorable books of Sam Rocha’s summer formed “a resounding counterfactual rebuke of the cottage industry reporting the doom of Catholic academia.”
Catholic Book Club
The Catholic Book Club explores two literary classics
Over the summer the Catholic Book Club read John Kennedy Toole’s darkly comic novel, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces,’ and this fall we are finishing up our discussion of John Howard Griffin’s ‘Black Like Me.’
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts