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Articles
Dramas of Decline and Fall
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by christopher beha tin house, 528 pages, $27.95 r Missionaries: A Novel by phil klay penguin, 416 pages, $28 In 2013, Dana...
Perilous Directions
Original Prin: A Novel by randy boyagoda biblioasis, 224 pages, $14.95 Pity the satirist: He labors under a double burden. There is, first and foremost, the need to be...
A Joyful Misanthrope
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by joy williams tin house, 168 pages, $19.95 Joy Williams has often been celebrated, but it seems safe to say that her prose is more...
Cultural Anorexia: Doubting the Decline of Faith in Fiction
When Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was...
Finished
The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Doubleday. 192 pp. $16.95 Muriel Spark, Dame of the British Empire, expatriate Scot living in Tuscany, has been practicing her peculiar brand of...
Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Tony Hendra’s Father Joe was given a front page review in the New York Times Book Review in which it was very nearly damned with shrill praise. The reviewer,...
Sweet Sistine
Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by ross king walker and company, 373 pages, $28 According to Giorgio Vasari, author of the monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,...
Modernism, Science, and Spirituality
Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual by lynn gamwell princeton university press, 344 pages, $49.95 In 1959, the British writer and science popularizer C. P. Snow published...
Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper
Within three years of its completion, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper began to flake and fade. The artist had staked his masterpiece, which he spent over two years...
The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War
The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War by hilton kramer ivan r. dee, 398 pages, $7.57 In the summer of 1952,...
Impoverished Theology
The Character of God: Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism by thomas e. jenkins oxford, 288 pages, $20.90 Theologians move in two worlds, working not only with...
Mystery and Desire
Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen HarperCollins, 179 pages, $20 Ron Hanen’s Mariette in Ecstasy is a haunting, enigmatic novel that is almost impossible to categorize, and it represents...
