Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘The White Bear’ gives us two novellas that work in conversation with each other. Both feature burly, uncouth protagonists who endure episodes of childhood trauma and develop a fiercely independent way of engaging with the world.
Literature
Posted inBooks
Review: Molly McNett and making the unsayable sayable
Molly McNett’s ‘Child of These Tears’ displays the difficulties of translation, the irreducibility of meaning, and the frustrating limitations of human nature and society.
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Review: Bennett Cerf, Random House co-founder and superstar editor
Gayle Feldman’s new biography of Bennett Cerf, ‘Nothing Random,’ is a window into the past of American literary culture.
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Sheed & Ward: the unlikely power couple who revolutionized Catholic publishing
As readers mark the centennial of the Sheed & Ward publishing house, we celebrate what “the Sheedwardians”—as that unlikely Catholic power couple sometimes called themselves—meant back in their heyday.
Posted inIdeas
Dylan Thomas was a difficult person. But ‘Fern Hill’ is a perfect poem.
To understand this poem, you don’t need biography. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well.
Posted inCatholic Book Club
Remembering Cyprian Davis, a giant of Black Catholic history
Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., was a prominent figure in the American church after the Second Vatican Council due to, among other achievements, his scholarship on Black Catholics, theology, spirituality, pastoral care, Black women religious in the United States and the multifaceted history of Black Christianity on these shores.
Posted inCatholic Movie Club
‘Train Dreams’ is about an ordinary life. But it points toward the extraordinary.
Based on a novella by Denis Johnson, ‘Train Dreams’ immerses us in the ordinary life of Robert Grainier in order to gesture at the extraordinary.
Posted inBooks
Catholics are both/and people. But we still face stark choices in following Christ.
Catholicism is a both/and religion, true, but that puts before us some strong binaries between having faith in Christ or not, between serving the least of these or not.
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Review: Kathleen Norris on a sister’s love
Kathleen Norris’s profound new book ‘Rebecca Sue’ is a kind of double memoir of Norris’s sister, who had suffered from severe mental disabilities, as well of the author herself and her family.
Posted inBooks
Review: Christianity against empire
Do you know that hauntingly beautiful moment in a story where the narrator zooms the perspective out just enough for you to see that everything is connected? When the shocking realization dawns that the plot was driven by an unseen force the entire time, our experience of the story itself is altered. Reading Kat Armas’s […]