news, views & reviews
Posted in Literary Criticism, Writing on Jun 9th, 2009
Wired has published a short but useful list of what writer Bruce Sterling regards as digital-age difficulties facing “literature” as we have known it these last few centuries. The fact that, “wired” (relatively speaking) as I am, I am unable to follow a couple of his examples may be proof enough of the problem us [...]
Posted in Anti-Catholic, Literary Criticism on May 17th, 2009
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 almost [...]
Posted in Biography/Autobiography, Literary Criticism on May 11th, 2009
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’ [...]
Posted in Biography/Autobiography, Literary Criticism on Apr 27th, 2009
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.” Nearly [...]
Posted in Biography/Autobiography, Literary Criticism on Apr 23rd, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Classics, Literary Criticism, Writing on Dec 6th, 2008
(from The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, first published 1929)
I see that Mr. Patrick Braybrooke and others, writing to the CATHOLIC TIMES, have raised the question of Catholic propaganda in novels written by Catholics. The very phrase, which we are all compelled to use, is awkward and even false. A Catholic putting Catholicism into [...]
Posted in Literary Criticism, Writing on Oct 27th, 2008
reviewed by John Murphy
How Fiction Works is a presuming title for a slim little book, made more conspicuous by a chapter called “A Brief History of Consciousness.” Oh, is that all? But the book’s author is James Wood, the New Yorker’s perspicacious literary critic, and his Preface quickly allays any fears of gassy pretension [...]
Posted in Literary Criticism on Sep 25th, 2008
by John Murphy
Having just read a collection of masterful short-stories by Tobias Wolff, the issue of what makes storytelling such an intrinsic, necessary part of the human condition has been at the forefront of my mind. An article in the most recent issue of Scientific American approaches this age-old question from a left-brained perspective…
Read the rest of John’s piece [...]
Posted in Literary Criticism on Dec 4th, 2007
The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy [...]
Posted in Classics, Literary Criticism on Dec 2nd, 2007
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, has recently authored a book called Classics for Pleasure, about the abiding joy of reading “duh classics,” as Tony Curtis would say. Included in Dirda’s book is an essay on G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which G.K. fans should be pleased-as-punch about. In [...]
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Death of a Pope by Piers Paul Read
Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole….In our own day, the English novelist who has most conspicuously defied his contemporaries is Evelyn Waugh.
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: Dawn, I found a French translation with Mauriac's intro, presumably also in French, but know of no English versions. (See; http://tinyurl.com/qbv3qn )
: I am trying to find the edition of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory that has an intro by Francois Mauriac. Can you help? [...]
: GREAT SITE! I only just found it because I have a guy who asked me to read The Shack. Too, bad he really loved it [...]
: Thanks for the tip, Costance. We'll check her out.
: Ya'll have an amazing site here, but you should read Carmen Marcoux's books and list them, because they are fabulous, and Catholic.
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