I tried to write about Shotgun Stories without mentioning you-know-who. It’s become such a cliché. A talented new artist captures a sense of the sacred and the profane in the American South, and before you can say “Christ-haunted” or “Southern Gothic,” there she is! It’s almost as if the standard-bearer of the genre created the…

Jeremiah Rose. I wish I could give him a pseudonym, but no other name can properly conjure his image: skinny, six feet tall; a thick beard and ponytail, and pale, roving eyes like holes cut in a mask. He wears casteless ripped jeans and T-shirts, but his backpack, with a hardhat clipped and dangling from…

There’s never a good reason to do a bad thing, but it’s possible, and regrettable, to do a good thing for a bad reason. Reading a novel (a good thing) for sociological content, for moral or ethical norms, or even simply for the jokes or titillating parts is a little bit like only eating the…

Last Tuesday night, there was no dinner in the house, but at the bottom of the refrigerator drawer was a bag of middling-sized potatoes that I had bought at the local farmers market, and which, if I waited any longer, would sprout. After considering for a moment, I went to work. I rinsed and scrubbed…

I grew up in a home with a map of Narnia on one living room wall and a map of Middle Earth on the wall facing it. As a child, I knew the difference between a nymph and a satyr, between a centaur and a faun. I knew Gollum and goblins and orcs and Aslan.…

“People who lived on the dark side…thanked God for their dark past, because it had deepened their soul, made a larger place for the love of God with which they were now on fire….” —from Circling My Mother, by Mary Gordon I read Brideshead Revisited for the first time recently and loved it. I also…

Last week, I took my nine-year-old goddaughter to the de Young museum to see the museum’s current headliner: glass artist Dale Chihuly. For weeks, visitors have been lining up to see the candy-colored creations: giant balls in a boat; long thin tapers of lavender glass; dribbly chandeliers; fantastic disks resembling umbrellas or the undersides of…

My housemates and I have been getting our nightly fix of the Democratic and Republican conventions via old-school radio. As we cook, read and tend children, proclamations echo through our cavernous old house like the din of some semi-distant calamity. The weather has been unseasonably cool here in Washington, DC, and all of our house’s…

An early scene in Ingmar Bergman’s film Through A Glass Darkly places Bergman’s brooding protagonist, the post-suicidal, proud old novelist David, hunched over the galley proofs of his latest novel, slowly adding adjectives with a heavy pen. When I first saw that scene, my thoughts turned to genre: is Bergman trying to kill the novel?…

Do you buy modern art? No, I’m not asking if you purchase contemporary artwork. I’m asking: Do you buy modernism as a legitimate form of artistic expression? Or do you think those who spend a fortune on Jackson Pollock canvases have been duped? Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary My Kid Could Paint That raises that question, and…