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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
“Evil is ‘thought-defying,’ because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is...
The Lesser Angels of Our Nature
The lesser angels of our present dangerArraign the better angels of our natureAnd rearrange the stature of our hatredOn which the union of our state is wagered. For Madison...
In Secular Saeculorum
If all the oughts and nots given by GodAre excommunicated from debate,Except in terms of conscience which she lauds,I’d like to blame our Holy Mother State. I’d blame this...
Sanguine
Requiescat in pace, Father Jacques HamelMartyred at the church of St. Étienne,Named for the first martyr. Before Pure Will he bows so reverently,His captive mind conformed to prison sheikh...
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...
