“3 Body Problem” is an imaginative Netflix adaptation of Cixin Liu’s trilogy of sci-fi novels—and yet is mostly true to the books.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Patrick Leahy, Senate stalwart
In ‘The Road Taken,’ Patrick Leahy’s deeply personal new memoir, he writes lovingly about his family, his Catholic faith and his home state but seems focused largely on describing the Washington, D.C., that was—and what it has become.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Flannery O’Connor’s sacramental vision
Jessica Hooten Wilson builds ‘Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress’ around the previously unpublished manuscript pages of O’Connor’s third novel, which was never finished.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: In his latest book, Christian Wiman looks despair in the face
In ‘Zero at the Bone,’ Christian Wiman offers a prismatic series of 50 chapters (52, counting the mystical zeros at the beginning and end) featuring essays, poems, theological reflections, personal reminiscences and literary analyses.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Elizabeth Cullinan, the ‘criminally under-read’ bard of the Bronx Irish
Elizabeth Cullinan’s literary output was not prodigious—but her memorable characters and close attention to the Irish-American culture in which she lived made her a prominent fiction writer in the ’70s and ’80s.
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
Spring poetry roundup: Mini catechisms in verse
In one way or another, these collections bear the traces of the divine, of the needful Christ.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Gerhard Lohfink on Jesus, discipleship and the life of faith
Gerhard Lohfink, who died last week in his native Germany at the age of 89, leaves behind an impressive legacy of faith-informed scholarship on the New Testament and Christian discipleship.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Tan Twan Eng’s new novel summons the spirit of Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Letter” serves as the linchpin of Tran Twan Eng’s third novel, “The House of Doors,” which was selected for the 2023 Booker Prize long list.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Jacques Maritain’s life of writing on politics, liturgy and St. Thomas Aquinas
“It is not easy to be a Catholic, and it is not easy to be a writer. To be a Catholic writer is doubly difficult,” wrote Jacques Maritain, who nevertheless became one of the most influential 20th-century Catholic writers on either side of the Atlantic.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The sometimes-savage perfection of Catholic parody
Parody, Ernest Hemingway said, is a step up from writing on the wall above the urinal. He was wrong.