While Edgar Allan Poe never enjoyed much commercial success during his short and troubled life, his reputation as an American original has only increased in the 175 years since.
Literature
Posted inCatholic Book Club
A century of ‘The Sun Also Rises’: Hemingway’s ‘Lost Generation’ turns 100
Ernest Hemingway’s breakthrough novel was published 100 years ago this week. ‘America’ didn’t have much to say about Hemingway then, but in the years since, he’s been a favorite topic.
Posted inTelevision
Can Florence Pugh redeem Steinbeck’s cruelest villain in Netflix’s ‘East of Eden’?
A new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” offers a hint of redemption for some of the novel’s villains while also engaging with Steinbeck’s primary themes.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
‘Speak, O Muse, of that ingenious woman’: Anne Carson wins the Nobel Prize
Though she was raised Catholic and a formative book in her childhood was an illustrated Lives of the Saints, Anne Carson does not have much time for the institutional church.
Posted inBooks
Review: Liberation and Palestine
‘The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology Amid Gaza,’ edited by the Palestinian theologians (and brothers) John and Samuel Munayer, can teach us much about a faith-based, justice response to the situation in the Middle East today.
Posted inBooks
Review: War and (uneasy) peace
Helen Benedict’s latest novel, ‘The Soldier’s House,’ focuses on the Iraq war, the turmoil it caused in the lives of one Iraqi family, and the American soldier who tries to help them.
Posted inBooks
Review: The American antichrists of our age
in ‘Defying Tyrants,’ Matthew Taylor argues that modern-day Christians concerned about the rise of Christian supremacist movements may benefit from recovering the early church’s understanding of the concept.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
‘Catcher in the Rye’ at 75: America magazine’s critiques (and defenses) of the classic novel
America more or less atoned over the years for its initial dismissal of Catcher in the Rye.
Posted inBooks
A Cormac McCarthy novel tore my parish book club apart
I found no hope, no goodness, no warmth to redeem the post-apocalyptic world of ‘The Road.’ My fellow parishioners disagreed.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Remembering Peter Henriot, a Jesuit scholar who helped put Catholic social teaching on the map
While U.S. Catholics might remember Peter Henriot, S.J., best for his social justice advocacy, he was better known in the minds of many for his decades of service to the church in Africa.