Archive
More than thirty-five years of First Things articles at your fingertips
Articles
Has Houellebecq Found a Happy Ending?
Annihilation: A Novel by michel houellebecq translated by shaun whiteside farrar, straus and giroux, 540 pages, $30 In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, Michel Houellebecq explained that...
Testing the Spirits of Jon Fosse’s A Shining
A Shiningby jon fossetranslated by damion searlstransit books, 88 pages, $16.95 In her little-known essay “The Spirit and Writing in a Secular World,” the reclusive Pulitzer Prize winner Donna...
George Saunders on Story
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Lifeby george saundersnrandom house, 432 pages, $28 In his...
The First Commandment of Fiction
What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith confessed last year in The New York Review of Books, “is the idea—popular in the culture just now . . . that we...
The Centurion’s Tale
Ernest Hemingway’s little-known play Today is Friday, originally published in the collection Men Without Women, is a haunting depiction of Christ’s crucifixion. The story begins in archetypal Hemingway fashion....
Kerouac’s Beatific Visions
Jack Kerouac, who coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” railed against those who interpreted it as meaning “beat down,” “heedless,” or “rootless.” For him, it meant “beato, the Italian for...
Peace In a Plastic World
Western secular culture “is a kind of hothouse growth,” Christopher Dawson wrote—an artificial culture that shelters us from “the direct impact of reality.” Neither birth nor death in secular...
Of Cigarettes and Grace
The dramatic action of grace is rooted in Christology: Christ descended into the world and passed through the particular in order to redeem. This movement is the model for writers...
Christ-Haunted George Saunders
In his 2013 article “The Catholic Writer Today,” Dana Gioia argued that the term “Catholic writer” no longer applies only to card-carrying members of the Church. Among the “three...
The Banality of Evil
Just fifty cents and eight dollars he paid / For every hour she helped him flush their flesh. ...
The Lesser Angels of Our Nature
The lesser angels of our present danger / Arraign the better angels of our nature / And rearrange the stature of our hatred...
In Secular Saeculorum
If all the oughts and nots given by God / Are excommunicated from debate, / Except in terms of conscience which she lauds...
Sanguine
Requiescat in pace, Father Jacques Hamel / Martyred at the church of St. Étienne, / Named for the first martyr. ...
Gehenna
Where Moloch relished children sacrificedOutside Jerusalem, where worms won’t die. Am I a fool to claim the cursed valeHas migrated from Israel to Mosul? A pack of cigarettes for...
