John Irving writes characters who, like Flannery O’Connor’s American South, seem somehow God-haunted.

Shannen Dee Williams’s 'Subversive Habits' uncovers—with authoritative, painstaking scholarship—a great deal of what was hidden and some of what has been erased concerning white supremacy in the Roman Catholic Church.

​​​​​​​There are roses in the thorny crown, pick them!

Here, now, the furled leaves bid adieu

you could’ve chosen to be ignorant to the demand that such a recognition may’ve placed on your limbs,

Sports memoirs tend to have a certain arc: the odyssey of the triumphant athlete. But every now and then, a retired athlete—like Jerry West, Abby Wambach and Gale Sayers—tells a more complicated story.