Jill P. Baumgaertner

Frank Schaeffer’s latest book, a novel, provides many signs that the author has at last found his genre. Living in the shadow of his father, Francis Schaeffer, ardent Calvinist and self-proclaimed missionary to the fundamentalist intelligentsia, the young Schaeffer grew up in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of the sounds here are familiar: Vivaldi plays the same in this language, keys rattle in locks, the engines of buses sigh as they turn street corners. But something is different, an odd solitude. It digs itself under my watch into the small bones of my wrist. Here in . . . . Continue Reading »

The rules of chaos are simple: A mountain is never a perfect cone. A lake is never really a circle. A drop of dew is not a microcosm. No. Flowers wither. Dust collects. There is the relentless return of what we do not want. Everything inclines to disorder. But then how . . . . Continue Reading »

Ordinary Time by a. g. mojtabai doubleday, 223 pages, $17.95 A.G. Mojtabai’s nonfiction work, Blessed Assurance, won the 1986 Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the American South. Now, in her fifth novel, Ordinary Time, in prose as clean and spare as the landscape which is its setting, . . . . Continue Reading »