Forms of Desire
By Book Review Issue 101
Katie Ford’s collection If You Have to Go was in steady rotation for me. I would finish another book, then go back and reread Ford.
Read MoreFirst Men and Original Sins
By Book Review Issue 101
We say we come in peace for all mankind, but we are actually warriors, killers, contaminated by something malign and grievous. But still we come.
Read MoreThirty Years, Thirty Books | Love, Hate, and Digestion: A Miscellany
By Book Review Issue 100
I did read a few books published in the last thirty years. Most of them bored me to tears. A few, however, were so odd or stupid or, here and there, brilliant that I had to take notice. I was not able to dismiss them, as I would probably have preferred to do.
Read MoreThirty Years, Thirty Books | Fiction: The Pleasures of Obsolescence
By Book Review Issue 100
The novel’s decline in importance relative to the memoir and the personal essay may be one of the major literary trends of the past thirty years, but it remains the most important form for me.
Read MoreThirty Years, Thirty Books | Poetry: A Word We Have Not Learned
By Book Review Issue 100
I want a little mystery. I don’t want to hear the obvious stated, even if I agree. I want to be awed.
Read MoreInventing the Kingdom
By Essay Issue 92
WHEN The Kingdom landed on my desk with a thud, I could tell that it would pose a challenge—that it would be a book I had to contend with. In addition to being a substantial tome, it comes with the cultural imprimatur conveyed by its publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose backlist includes…
Read MoreAtheist Bodies
By Book Review Issue 90
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press, 2015) A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain by Christina Crosby (New York University Press, 2016) SON,” HE BEGINS. “LAST SUNDAY the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to…
Read MoreMystery at Work: Three Novels in Review
By Book Review Issue 89
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (Spiegel & Grau, 2016) Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) Wilberforce by H.S. Cross (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015) STRONG NOVELS IMMERSE READERS in distinct worlds, with their own rules, cultures, and belief systems. The best novels refuse to supply pat answers or…
Read MoreThrough the Ear
By Book Review Issue 88
The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) The Art of Listening in the Early Church by Carol Harrison (Oxford, 2013) God’s “I” remains the root word that sounds like a pedal note through all of revelation; it resists all attempts…
Read MoreBeing Shown the Way
By Book Review Issue 54
Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape by Sam Fentress (David and Charles, 2007) I GREW UP outside Portage, Ohio, on an acre with corn fields on three sides and the county highway on the fourth. On our disused barn was a painted advertisement: CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. The enduring letters…
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