news, views & reviews
reviewed by John Murphy First published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray remains a puzzling, paradoxical book. Camille Paglia called it “a web of Romantic fascination, a force field of Apollonian and daemonic charisma.” Joyce Carol Oates called it “knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic.” Wilde’s only novel continues to exert its curious, possibly unwholesome influence. [...]
Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland is this year’s recipient of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award, has written a piece on Flannery O’Connor for the recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly (using Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery: A Life, as the occasion). O’Neill describes O’Connor’s writing as “unfairly” and “wickedly” good: The narrating third person hovers in an [...]
The Nation has reviewed The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller, a memoir about Miller’s experience re-reading C.S. Lewis’ beloved Chronicles of Narnia as an adult. Now a successful editor of Salon, Miller was once enthralled by Lewis’ Narnia series. Her book — part memoir, part literary criticism — is her attempt to theorize why Lewis’ [...]
Michael Dirda, Washington Post’s perspicacious literary critic, sets his sights on a new collection of correspondence by Graham Greene, the great Catholic novelist. He writes: His men and women are murderers, traitors, unhappy adulterous lovers, sinners of every stripe–and he doesn’t glamorize their seediness, their misery, or their desperation. Evelyn Waugh bluntly called them “charmless.” [...]
The Guardian book blog has a short but illuminating piece on the importance of Flannery O’Connor’s deeply-felt Catholicism on her work. O’Connor is on a shortlist of the best short-story writers of the twentieth century, and though her “Christ-haunted” South is peopled with Protestants, there is no question that Catholicism was her writing’s wellspring. For [...]
Hello, all! John Murphy here, resident illustrator for Idylls Press. Just letting you know that we have three new author portraits over at our Cafe Press site. The three victims of my pen & ink portraits are JK Huysmans, a French Decadent and later convert to Catholicism; Edith Wharton, the first female recipient of the [...]
From a Godspy review: A legendary manuscript co-written by Beat Masters, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has finally come to light as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written when both were unknown and unpublished, leading hardscrabble lives in wartime New York, the real-life story centers on the doomed relationship between Lucien Carr [...]
In September of last year I wrote a piece for Godspy on Ron Hansen’s Exiles a haunting and beautifully written meditation on priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the composition of one of his masterworks, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” about a shipwreck that took the lives of five Franciscan nuns in 1875. Hansen’s earlier novel, [...]
Well, in spite of our natural Luddite tendencies the siren song of social networking has lured us to Facebook. Idylls Press, your hosts here at Catholic Fiction (as well as Bardolatry and Catholic Film Reviews) now have a Facebook page where our friends can keep up-to-date on the latest our small press has to offer [...]
John Updike died yesterday of lung cancer at age 76. Most memorials will concentrate on his prolific writing career, his prodigious gifts as a prose stylist, his contributions to the New Yorker, his conservatism (he was a churchgoer, a rare breed among the literati) and maybe the controversies over sexually explicit books like Couples and [...]
Reviewed by John Murphy Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment is a sincere but shallow attempt to trace Christ’s growing divinity during his young adulthood, before entering public ministry. Deepak Chopra outlines his good intentions in an Author’s Note where he describes his novel as “pure fiction,” but goes on to say that “I’ve gotten a [...]
From Michael Dirda’s Washington Post review of a new biography of the Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, written by Paul Mariani: “There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani’s possesses three great strengths: 1) Mariani has lived with Hopkins’s [...]
By John Updike Reviewed by John Murphy “Years ago we grabbed what we wanted from the town and then left. Now we’ve returned to give something back.” So avows Alexandra, one of the three Witches of Eastwick who have transformed, through no unnatural spell, into three aging Widows of Eastwick, the title characters of John [...]
Reviewed by John Murphy What if a younger, hotter Judge Judy was elected to the Supreme Court? That’s the basic premise of Supreme Courtship, a toothy and timely political satire from the pen of Christopher Buckley, progeny of the late lamented William F. Donald P. Vanderdamp is a lame-duck president with approval ratings in the [...]
Reviewed by John Murphy There are a lot of things I could say about City of Thieves. I might comment on its gritty evocation of a specific time and place (1942 Leningrad under Nazi siege), its likable characters, gallows humor, or its sturdy plot. The salient point is this: I stayed up half the night [...]
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