The stories in Valerie Sayers’s new collection are populated with characters who strive to hang on to something good.
Literature
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
Reading C. S. Lewis in the Time of Covid
The question Lewis proposed is analogous to the one we have to deal with now: What use is it to study during wartime?
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
The radical embodiment of Louise Glück’s poetry
The recognition of Louise Glück with the Nobel Prize in Literature was a bright spot in 2020 for her fans and her fellow poets alike.
Posted inArts & Culture, 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.’
Posted inArts & Culture, 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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, 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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
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.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Gentrifying tragedy on intellectual whim
Terry Eagleton’s new book on tragedy can be a difficult read.