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Love in the Ruins II – Why Does God Permit Suffering?
For most of the week it has been raining. On Pascha we raised our candles—Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen!—and ate our lamb, sprawled out with friends drinking wine and eating sweet spicy tsoureki bread for hours, and fell early and exhausted into bed, the rain still thudding outside.
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Love in the Ruins
I don’t know whether it’s because it’s almost Eastern Orthodox Holy Week or the fact that I will turn forty this year, but I am preoccupied by the idea that things, generally, are falling apart, and vastly in need of renewal. I am feeling the press of mortality. Not long ago I found myself standing in the confessional, listening to a short, Yoda-like priest....
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Housekeeping
When my mother-in-law was a bride in 1968, she discovered that one of her new responsibilities was to iron my father-in-law’s army uniform. First she dipped the freshly-washed pants and shirt in a solution of water and starch. Not a can of Niagara, but the powdered kind in a box. She’d squeeze it, then roll the uniform in towels and chill it in the refrigerator for hours before she ever even got the ironing board.
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Obama, Faulkner, and the Open Wound
For some weeks now, I’ve been saying that I would finally get around to discussing Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel Fortress of Solitude and describe why I found this novel (among others) ultimately characteristic of the disappointments of contemporary fiction. Today, though, all I can think about is how much there is in this haunting novel about race and class in 1970s Brooklyn that Lethem did get right.
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Non-Nonfiction
For the past two weeks now, I have been mulling over my pledge for this entry to discuss three recent major novels that I liked (and in the case of two, loved), but which also illustrate the narrative laziness that seems to characterize a lot of contemporary fiction. In case you’ve been racked with curiosity, they are...
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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