Sometimes you have to leave home to find home. That’s the paradox of the immigrant experience, portrayed beautifully in “Brooklyn.”
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Poetry of the seeking soul
A tourist who is out of time approaches the end of his or her trip and must return home soon. This is how the Rev. David May describes himself through his poems.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The end of neoliberalism
In ‘Tyranny, Inc.,’ Sohrab Ahmari supplies a framework and examples of what has shaped the desperate plight of a growing number of Americans.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Julia Alvarez riffs on ‘Arabian Nights’
‘The Cemetery of Untold Stories’ reads like a novel made up of all the stories that Julia Alvarez no longer wants to carry in bits and pieces in her head,. And Alvarez knows that we all are—and need to be—story creatures.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Nabokov, ‘Lolita’ and the question of morally offensive art
‘Lolita’ may have been canceled, but Vladimir Nabokov remains the godfather of modern prose.
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
Why you should read Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’
A hymn to mercy and love, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” springs to my lips when my heart is quiet. I teach it as often as I can for my introductory poetry students.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The art of the presidential tell-all book
Much ink has been spilled over this presidential election—but not nearly as much as was used in a long history of presidential memoirs and biographies.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel takes us deep into presidential politics, divine providence and the NBA
Vinson Cunningham’s constant application of a critical eye in his work for The New Yorker must have helped in composing his first novel, “Great Expectations.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Willa Cather, the author of great American Catholic novels—who wasn’t Catholic
Few writers have ever captured in fiction the American religious sense that underlies so much of our history more than Willa Cather.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
‘Septology’ is one long reflection on the nature of God
Jon Fosse’s ‘Septology’ is a literary masterpiece imbued with mysticism and theological insight.