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"We are wide-eyed for hard-won wisdom. We are wide-eyed for epiphanies of beauty."
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Wiseblood Books fosters works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of noise and rescue us from the republic of boredom; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; and render well this world's countless sublimities and sufferings without forfeiting hope—all of this with an unflinching gaze, wide-eyed. [read more HERE]
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New Release
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Works of Mercy
Sally Thomas Kirsty Sain, aging housekeeper for the newly arrived young priest, assumes that despite this personnel change in her rural parish, her own solitary rounds will proceed as always. She will go to Mass, clean the rectory, go home again. She will keep herself to herself in the safely-hedged present and coexist in detente with the past. When a hairless, eyeless kitten is thrust upon her, an unlikely deterrent to the mice invading her house, she declares, “I am not going to love that thing.” She has spent a lifetime armoring herself against the risks of affection. But between the hapless Father Schuyler, who teeters on the edge of breakdown, and the crises of the Malkins, a parish family whose cheerful chaos erupts in tragedy . . . [read more HERE] "I am always hoping to find novels like this one, but so rarely do I find them. What a gift to spend time with Kirsty, whose story is both ordinary and luminous, as a story like this reminds me every life must be. Thomas's writing is wry, clear-eyed, restrained, and above all, beautiful. This is a debut novel, which is a terrible shame for anyone (like me) who'd have liked to go out and devour five more of her novels right away, but what marvellous news for the American literary landscape."—Natalie Morrill, author of The Ghost Keeper, Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction |
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The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams
J.V. Cunningham The author of this small but superbly crafted book of lyrics, epigrams, and translations, J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985), is almost totally unknown outside a small literary coterie. His controversial contemporary Yvor Winters thought Cunningham was one of the greatest of the poets in our language, and, despite their complicated personal relationship, vigorously promoted his work. First issued in 1960, The Exclusions of a Rhyme brings together Cunningham's first four books of poetry--The Helmsman, The Judge is Fury, Doctor Drink, and Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted--published between 1942 and 1959, as well as a "prefatory" poem, "To My Wife," and a handful of translations of Latin poetry. Cunningham would always consider himself a Westerner and once opened a lecture at Amherst by referring to himself as a "renegade Irish Catholic from the plains of Montana," despite not having lived in Montana since his youth. The American West left its mark on his imagination, as can be seen in the imagery of many of his poems. As any reader will quickly observe, Cunningham's verse is formal in the extreme-there is nothing accidental, no wasted verbiage, nothing extra, no Whitmanian inclusiveness. Though his poems deal with a variety of subjects and themes both serious and unserious--"the trivial, vulgar, and exalted"--and employ many different poetic styles and meters, to a poem they exhibit a scrupulous attention to matters of form. . . . [read more HERE] |
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Death Comes for the Cathedrals
Marcel Proust This Wiseblood Books edition of Death Comes for the Cathedrals includes an introduction by its translator, Dr. John Pepino, and an afterword by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, who wonders whether life may yet return to the cathedrals. Throughout, beautiful color images of Chartres and its architectural features grace the pages. "Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable." So begins Marcel Proust's Death Comes for the Cathedrals (La mort des cathédrales), originally published in Le Figaro (1904). Proust addresses the political and religious debate concerning the "the Briand bill," a parliamentary proposal which imperiled the fate of French Cathedrals--"the first and most perfect masterpieces" of Gothic architecture. The great author of In Search of Lost Time gives prophetic voice to his own fear that "France would be transformed into a shore where giant chiseled conches seemed to have run aground, emptied of the life that inhabited them and no longer bringing an attentive ear to the distant murmur of the past, simply museum objects, themselves frozen . . . [read more HERE] |
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As Earth Without Water
Katy Carl When Dylan Fielding, celebrated contemporary visual artist, becomes Br. Thomas Augustine, novice at Our Lady of the Pines monastery, he finds delight not only in the shock his choice causes everyone around him but—to his own surprise—in the rhythms of the life itself. Shortly before he solidifies a lifelong commitment to the community, a traumatic encounter with an abusive priest plunges Thomas Augustine into terror and doubt. Reeling and uncertain, he reaches out to his friend, rival, and former lover, Angele Solomon, with hopes that she can help him to speak the difficult truth. As she attempts to advocate for her friend, Angele must ask how the scars left by their common past—as well as newer harms—can ever be healed or transcended. The wider inquiries demanded next will transfigure how both of them picture a range of human and divine things: time and memory; art and agency; trust and responsibility; and what it might mean to know real freedom. "Katy Carl’s As Earth Without Water is a sharp and moving meditation on freedom, choice, and the creative life. 'Art is from the soul,' one of Carl’s lost painters insists; this novel certainly reads like it is." —Christopher Beha, Editor of Harper’s, author of What Happened to Sophie Wilder and The Index of Self-Destructive Acts |
Fiction
Works of Mercy
Sally Thomas |
Monographs
The Situation of
the Catholic Novelist Trevor C. Merrill |
Poetry
The Joseph Tree
Isabel Chenot |
Classics
Christ & Apollo
William F. Lynch |
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"The late James Laughlin’s publishing house, New Directions, is the standard at the moment for contemporary fiction. When you see ND on the spine, you know that you’re getting a solid work that is actively engaged with contemporary literary concerns. It is still too early to tell what will become of the upstart Wiseblood Books, but such a strong entry as this early on is a sign that it is heading in the right direction."
—From M.A. Peterson's review of Wiseblood Books'
A Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales of the Appalachian Foothills |
