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With all of the books, films, CDs, and visual art featured in this e-newsletter, we know there's much to choose from each year. Hence our gift to you just in time for Christmas: a list of our top ten picks of 2008. In chronological order of appearance, here are ten of the works we've featured in ImageUpdate this past year that stand out to us (and many of which would make fine gifts). This is an admittedly subjective list—these are personal favorites of ImageUpdate contributors. If you'd like to read the original ImageUpdate feature on any of the works, click on the links provided. We hope you'll enjoy this list and that you will find time to spend in the company of the many gifted writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers we have featured in ImageUpdate this year.

Merry Christmas to you and yours from all of us at Image.

Ambition and Survival:Becoming a Poet is not only a work of critical thought, but also a seamless blending of autobiography, rumination, and insightful analysis. Merging the personal and critical, Wiman delves into everything from humorous and sad episodes with his father to the intersection of faith and art. Wiman's poetics inform his musings on, among others, Thomas Hardy, Hart Crane, George Mackay Brown, and Basil Bunting. For all its autobiography and poetry, however, one of the book's underlying subjects is Wiman's own movement away from faith and his honest and perceptive struggle with it thereafter. More...

If short stories tend to be overshadowed by longer fiction in your reading life, pick up Eyes to See, a new collection of stories selected by Bret Lott, and prepare to fall in love with the short story form again—or for the first time. Lott gathers this collection of ten stories from across centuries and continents, making a case for the form simply by offering up a buffet-like sampling to whet your palate. He has chosen classics as well as contemporary works, all by masters of the form—including Flannery O'Connor, Shusako Endo, Andre Dubus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anthony Trollope, and Henry Van Dyke. More...

Australian novelist Tim Winton comes from his country's western coast—a place with few big cities, generally poorer and more desolate than the populous southeast. And yet it is also a place of raw beauty and terrible simplicity. Winton has mined this rich vein in a variety of world-class novels, including his new book, the slim, intense novel, Breath. Its protagonist is a boy named Bruce Pike—Pikelet to his friends. Along with his friend Loonie he explores the rivers, forests, and beaches of western Australia, gaining a fascination for diving and especially for surfing. Winton's prose is precise and restrained but lifts into lyricism as it describes the thrill and wonder of surfing itself. More...

Anyone who has written a memoir, kept a diary, or shared a personal testimony could be said to have participated in an act of narrative theology. That impulse to frame our individual lives with a clear and comprehensible narrative is what Alan Jacobs explores in his new book, Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life. Jacobs examines the tradition of telling individual life stories as an inherently religious practice. The book makes a compelling study for anyone interested in memoir or autobiography—why should we craft a narrative out of our lives, and how can we do so properly, with both humility and hope? More...

The great gift of Richard Chess's poetry is that it reminds us of the earthiness of language—its sounds and shapes, the way it bears the marks of history and geography. His work conveys a palpable sense of the landscape of Israel and Palestine and its beauties and horrors, both ancient and modern. Chess's latest collection, Third Temple, explores the postmodern diaspora that threatens to pull the speakers in these poems free from the past, and from those physical and spiritual origins. But the voices Chess employs are tenacious, listening hard to their own histories of loss to find a hard-won, and often playful, rootedness in tradition. More...

Robert Clark is a writer who is never in a rush. His stories unfold slowly, the melodic lines of various characters, themes, and symbols stretching over long arcs as they accrete meaning and emotional resonance. This is the case with his new book, Dark Water, a multi-layered recounting of the 1966 flood that devastated the city of Florence and some of its greatest masterpieces. The center of the book is a page-turning account of the flood, but it is embedded in narrative strata that touch on art history, Italian politics, and the growth of Florence as a tourist destination. More...

Lia Purpura addresses these short, untitled poems to a found object, a totem made of two gourds and decorated with cowrie shells. Purpura found the object, which she calls "King Baby," in a riverbed while walking with her children. In the poems, her unexpected discovery becomes a version of the classic myth of the stranger from heaven who shows up needing a place to stay, along with an unconventional meditation on motherhood. And, as the poems take on a contemplative tone, the event of King Baby's discovery comes to seem more like a Nativity tale, if a bizarre one. More...

The Pacific Theatre in Vancouver, BC proudly presents the musician duo of Eisenhauer and Sheree Plett in combination with the play Jesus, My Boy by John Dowie. Eisenhauer and Plett will be playing a mix of new Christmas folk/rock pieces with old folk songs—all found on their new Christmas album, Lights Used to Shine. Described as "a comic reminiscence about parenthood, carpentry, and the coming of the Messiah," Jesus, My Boy stars David Adams (Stuff Happens) and is directed by Sarah Rodgers (Driving Miss Daisy). The show runs until December 27, and tickets can be purchased at the box office or online. The Pacific Theatre is located on 1420 West 12th Ave and Hemlock Street, Vancouver, BC. For more information, call (604) 731-5518 or click here.

No one writes about the misfortunes of the body quite as wryly as Valerie Sayers, who describes herself as a "cheerful hypochondriac." In Sayers's stories and essays, pain intensifies everything about us: our generosity and wisdom, maybe, but also, frankly, our vanity, our folly, and our white-knuckled grip on life. There's nothing transcendent about the way Sayers's characters experience illness, but somehow, redemption creeps in at its own dawdling pace. And precisely because Sayers doesn't clamor for it, it arrives at last. And when it gets there, it's the kind you can lean into.

Click here to listen.

We'd like to invite all our ImageUpdate readers to take a moment, if you haven't already, to read our end-of-year annual appeal letter and to check out our brand new monthly giving option. Image's vision for art and faith has flourished for the past twenty years--and we know it's thanks to the folks who have believed in that vision alongside us. ImageUpdate would not exist were it not for volunteers willing to write and edit IU without pay and those generous donors who support Image with their financial gifts. We already consider you all part of the Image family. In this season of giving, we ask that you consider whether you might join the ranks of our financial supporters. It would mean more than we can say.

You can give right now by clicking here and donating over our secure server, or make a monthly donation here. Or, if you prefer to give by mail, just send Gregory Wolfe an e-mail at gwolfe@spu.edu with your mailing address and we'll send you a print version of this letter, a response card, and an envelope.

Short on cash and wondering where your bailout is? Or just wondering what to get for the person who has everything? We're here to help. Now's your chance to stock up at imagejournal.org because we're having a huge sale on Image back issues and books! Nearly everything in our online store is marked down, with discounts from 10% to 70% off, and more on bulk orders. This sale will be available only for a limited time, and in some cases while supplies last, so order while you can.

Click here to shop at the bailout rate!

Are you an undergraduate student who'd like to work for Image this coming summer? Or do you know someone who might be interested? The purpose of the Luci Shaw Fellowship is to expose a promising student to the world of literary publishing and introduce him or her to the contemporary dialogue about art and faith that surrounds Image, its programs, its contributors, and its peer organizations. In short, we're looking for summer fellows who share our vision for the place art has in the life of faith, and who are also diligent, meticulous, and responsible about the daily details. There's grunt work galore in this job, but also plenty of opportunities to grasp the vision at the heart of a dynamic arts organization. The Shaw Fellow will also receive a scholarship to Image's Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Applications are due February 1, 2009.

To learn more about the Luci Shaw Fellowship, and to download an application, click here.

If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you're ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it's time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work--work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal's content is not available on our website, but only through what we call "the sacrament of print." Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls "evocative and inspiring" and Bret Lott calls "the most meaningful literary journal being produced today."

Publisher: Gregory Wolfe
Managing Editor: Beth Bevis
Layout: David Rither
Contributors: Beth Bevis, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Anna Johnson, Matt Malyon, Julie Mullins, Hannah Notess, and Gregory Wolfe

ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews.

ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours--all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website.

Copyright © 2008 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved.