2021 End-of-Year Letter
Dear Readers,
During this difficult and demoralizing year, Wiseblood has maintained the momentum it gained in 2020; thanks in no small measure to our great-souled donors and dedicated editorial staff, the books we have brought out in 2021 give witness to a new idiom forged by writers riddled by the Incarnation—the Divine Infant whose birth we approach with wide-eyed awe. Here are some high water marks:
Miracles, a minor classic of Japanese literature, by one of postwar Japan's most prolific writers, Sono Ayako. Wiseblood partnered with the Benedict XVI Institute to publish this provocative pursuit of the supernatural. The Benedict XVI Institute hosted a virtual release event with Archbishop Cordileone: St. Maximilian Kolbe in Japan. Translator Kevin Doak helps us grasp the central tensions and truths of the novel in his interview with Thomas Mirus on the podcast Catholic Culture.
As Earth Without Water, a debut novel with serious reach and staying power, written by our 2020 writer-in-residence Katy Carl. Harper’s editor Christopher Beha called Katy’s novel "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." In October, the Catholic University of America hosted a virtual reading of Katy’s novel, and it was selected as a staff pick by the CUA Press. In December, the Collegium Institute and Dappled Things Magazine hosted Katy and Joshua Hren for a literary reading and discussion, engaging in an extended consideration of both her novel and the fate of faith and fiction in our time. Katy was also interviewed on CrossWord, whose host Michèle McAloon considers this “One of the rare times when a reader can realize that within a young artist like Katy Carl, a literary genius is unfolding.”
We published the first English rendering of Léon Bloy’s Exegesis of Commonplaces (translated by Louis Cancelmi), a book of spiritual and tragic-comic genius that salvages truth from the everyday dustbin. Bloy recognizes that “the most inane representatives of the bourgeoisie are themselves fearsome prophets,” and that, “in the form of Commonplaces, they continually and unwittingly advance truly impressive claims, the implications of which, to them, remain unknown.” Those implications, the supernatural blood invigorating an otherwise superficial and often incoherent idiom, are Bloy’s true subject, and it is the purpose of his Exegesis to distill their essence. In August, New Polity published an excerpt of our translation in their print issue: “Léon Bloy on the Profundity of the Banal Quip,” and Dappled Things’ Michael Rennier reviewed the Bloy book HERE.
Christ & Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination by William F. Lynch, S.J. With the aid of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus—where Fr. Lynch served for over forty years as a priest and professor—we were able to bring back into print this one-of-a-kind inquiry into the nature and aim of literature. Our beautiful new edition includes a revised introduction by Glenn C. Arbery. Time Magazine wrote that “Theologian Lynch, in short, is an existentialist. But existence does not lead him, like Sartre, to nausea, but, like David, to dance before the ark.”
The Awakening Imagination: Image, Idol, Object, Icon, by painter and novelist Michael D. O'Brien is part of our Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture. This beautifully-bound hardcover book is built upon a lecture O’Brien gave at the Center for Faith and Culture, Oxford. Citing examples that range from cave painting to classical sculpture, the icon and manuscript illumination to film and contemporary literature, O’Brien proposes that a new iconography is waiting for us.
Death Comes for the Cathedrals, by Marcel Proust. As Proust contends, though the cathedrals of France and the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite are the spiritual inheritance of the Church, they are part of the patrimony of all humanity, and their loss would leave all the world impoverished: "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." Originally published in Le Figaro (1904), this freshly-translated Wiseblood Books edition includes an introduction by 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.
Padre Raimundo's Army & Other Stories, a short-story collection by accomplished poet and fictionist Arthur Powers. The stories in this collection draw from decades of living in Brazil and working in a variety of positions—beginning as a Peace Corps community organizer and later practicing international law. Co-editor of The Best American Catholic Short Stories, Patricia Schnapp, writes that Powers’ “chief interest is the human heart and its revelations and struggles. His stories often become engrossing modern parables that haunt us and expand our souls."
The Situation of the Catholic Novelist is a swift but comprehensive essay by Trevor Cribben Merrill, author of Minor Indiginities (Wiseblood Books, 2020). Tod Worner, Editor of the Word on Fire Institute Journal, writes that "In this incisive essay, Trevor Cribben Merrill offers an appraisal that is keen and penetrating, a vision that is hopeful and bold. There is a nexus where Catholicism, culture, and craft meet, and Merrill’s essay calls us to that center again and again. W.H. Auden purportedly said, 'You owe it to us all to get on with what you are good at.' Catholic novelists, your time is now."
Dense Poems and Socratic Light, the poetry portion of our double-volume of John Finlay’s life work, received a thoughtful review by Micah Mattix in The Spectator: “To say that the poet John Martin Finlay has been forgotten is not quite right. He was never ‘remembered’—read by a significant number of people—in the first place. But his best work is as good as the best work of many of the poets of his time, and Wiseblood Books is hoping to set things right.”
Minor Indignities, Trevor Cribben Merrill’s debut novel, received reviews that book-ended 2021: in January, the book was reviewed by Joshua P. Hochschild in Front Porch Republic: “Trevor Cribben Merrill’s Minor Indignities shows the spiritual power of the small-man-on-campus novel.” In December, Catholic World Report published a review capturing the difficult truth that (in the words of St. Bernard) “humiliation is the way to humility”: the protagonist’s indignities “strip away the last vestiges of [his] narcissistic pride, and he comes to realize how foolish much of his behavior was and how inauthentic his search for authenticity had been.” The American Mind included Merrill’s novel in its “A Christmas Gift Guide for the Discerning Dad.” In March, Jeffrey Wald reviewed Minor Indignities for Genealogies of Modernity, wherein he remarks upon a new fictional movement that takes “the long view . . . peering straight through the center of postmodern misery to the only convincing remedy: wisdom born of suffering and endurance.”
Boundaries of Eden, by Glenn Arbery was reviewed by Chilton Williamson, Jr. in Catholic World Report: “Glenn Arbery’s Boundaries of Eden is a book set in the contemporary American South that contains, to one degree or another, every literary ingredient of the genre known as the ‘Southern novel’—as well as several associated with those of the thriller and horror ones—while dramatizing how far the New South has diverged from the Old, and the New South from its postmodern equivalent.”
In January, First Things’ editor R.R. Reno discussed his Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture Duty, the Soul of Beauty: Henry James on the Beautiful Life on Conversations with Mark Bauerlein.
Pierre Manent’s Essay The Tragedy of the Republic (preface by Patrick Deneen), received several stimulating reviews, both of which expand beyond the essay’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. In Law & Liberty, Daniel J. Mahoney sees Manent’s meditation as part of “the unending search for and articulation of the common good,” and Voegelin View tries to pinpoint the tragedy that has disrupted this search: “the project of a totalitarian technocracy in which citizens are simply taken care of as opposed to being participants in civic life . . . However, since tragedy is always accompanied by the death of the hero, Manent seems to be tolling the imminent death of what has been called the managerial state.”
This past July Wiseblood hosted Sally Thomas for our annual Writer in Residence. It was an honor and a joy to work with her. Thomas is the author of a poetry collection, Motherland, a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award and published by Able Muse Press in 2020. Sally spent the Residency giving shape and depth to her first novel. Works of Mercy follows Kirsty, a woman who “was in many ways a more contented widow than I had been a wife,” as she cleans the rectory of a rural parish “for the good of my soul” and sifts through a series of strained memories. Kirsty cannot leave the unseasoned pastor to his own devices; nor can she ignore the needs of the Malkins, a sprawling parish family courting loss and chaos. At first reluctantly and eventually with abandon, Kirsty warms to the wisdom of Robert Southwell, SJ, whose poem “Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares” contains the novel’s skeleton key: Sorrowe is the Sister of Mercy. Read more about the Residency HERE, and keep your eyes wide for Works of Mercy, due out through Wiseblood in 2022.
Although I spent many of my waking and working hours co-founding and teaching in the new MFA at the University of St. Thomas, Houston (see HERE and HERE), giving public lectures and interviews on my new book How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic (see HERE and HERE), preparing for the 2022 publication of my novel Infinite Regress and my theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism (see this vanity of vanities HERE), and preparing for the birth of our fourth child in January, I continue to maintain editorial, supervisory, and promotional work with Wiseblood Books. Our editorial team is stronger than ever, thanks especially to the faithful assistance of our Managing Editor Louis Maltese, as well as the copyediting virtuosity of Mary Lang and Kate Weaver. We remain ready for another year of books! As ever, we rely on your monetary support, which underwrites our intransient commitment to publishing new books in the Catholic literary tradition. Please consider making a tax-deductible Donation of Constantine, or offering even a Widow’s Mite, HERE.
With great gratitude,
Joshua
During this difficult and demoralizing year, Wiseblood has maintained the momentum it gained in 2020; thanks in no small measure to our great-souled donors and dedicated editorial staff, the books we have brought out in 2021 give witness to a new idiom forged by writers riddled by the Incarnation—the Divine Infant whose birth we approach with wide-eyed awe. Here are some high water marks:
Miracles, a minor classic of Japanese literature, by one of postwar Japan's most prolific writers, Sono Ayako. Wiseblood partnered with the Benedict XVI Institute to publish this provocative pursuit of the supernatural. The Benedict XVI Institute hosted a virtual release event with Archbishop Cordileone: St. Maximilian Kolbe in Japan. Translator Kevin Doak helps us grasp the central tensions and truths of the novel in his interview with Thomas Mirus on the podcast Catholic Culture.
As Earth Without Water, a debut novel with serious reach and staying power, written by our 2020 writer-in-residence Katy Carl. Harper’s editor Christopher Beha called Katy’s novel "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." In October, the Catholic University of America hosted a virtual reading of Katy’s novel, and it was selected as a staff pick by the CUA Press. In December, the Collegium Institute and Dappled Things Magazine hosted Katy and Joshua Hren for a literary reading and discussion, engaging in an extended consideration of both her novel and the fate of faith and fiction in our time. Katy was also interviewed on CrossWord, whose host Michèle McAloon considers this “One of the rare times when a reader can realize that within a young artist like Katy Carl, a literary genius is unfolding.”
We published the first English rendering of Léon Bloy’s Exegesis of Commonplaces (translated by Louis Cancelmi), a book of spiritual and tragic-comic genius that salvages truth from the everyday dustbin. Bloy recognizes that “the most inane representatives of the bourgeoisie are themselves fearsome prophets,” and that, “in the form of Commonplaces, they continually and unwittingly advance truly impressive claims, the implications of which, to them, remain unknown.” Those implications, the supernatural blood invigorating an otherwise superficial and often incoherent idiom, are Bloy’s true subject, and it is the purpose of his Exegesis to distill their essence. In August, New Polity published an excerpt of our translation in their print issue: “Léon Bloy on the Profundity of the Banal Quip,” and Dappled Things’ Michael Rennier reviewed the Bloy book HERE.
Christ & Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination by William F. Lynch, S.J. With the aid of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus—where Fr. Lynch served for over forty years as a priest and professor—we were able to bring back into print this one-of-a-kind inquiry into the nature and aim of literature. Our beautiful new edition includes a revised introduction by Glenn C. Arbery. Time Magazine wrote that “Theologian Lynch, in short, is an existentialist. But existence does not lead him, like Sartre, to nausea, but, like David, to dance before the ark.”
The Awakening Imagination: Image, Idol, Object, Icon, by painter and novelist Michael D. O'Brien is part of our Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture. This beautifully-bound hardcover book is built upon a lecture O’Brien gave at the Center for Faith and Culture, Oxford. Citing examples that range from cave painting to classical sculpture, the icon and manuscript illumination to film and contemporary literature, O’Brien proposes that a new iconography is waiting for us.
Death Comes for the Cathedrals, by Marcel Proust. As Proust contends, though the cathedrals of France and the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite are the spiritual inheritance of the Church, they are part of the patrimony of all humanity, and their loss would leave all the world impoverished: "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." Originally published in Le Figaro (1904), this freshly-translated Wiseblood Books edition includes an introduction by 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.
Padre Raimundo's Army & Other Stories, a short-story collection by accomplished poet and fictionist Arthur Powers. The stories in this collection draw from decades of living in Brazil and working in a variety of positions—beginning as a Peace Corps community organizer and later practicing international law. Co-editor of The Best American Catholic Short Stories, Patricia Schnapp, writes that Powers’ “chief interest is the human heart and its revelations and struggles. His stories often become engrossing modern parables that haunt us and expand our souls."
The Situation of the Catholic Novelist is a swift but comprehensive essay by Trevor Cribben Merrill, author of Minor Indiginities (Wiseblood Books, 2020). Tod Worner, Editor of the Word on Fire Institute Journal, writes that "In this incisive essay, Trevor Cribben Merrill offers an appraisal that is keen and penetrating, a vision that is hopeful and bold. There is a nexus where Catholicism, culture, and craft meet, and Merrill’s essay calls us to that center again and again. W.H. Auden purportedly said, 'You owe it to us all to get on with what you are good at.' Catholic novelists, your time is now."
Dense Poems and Socratic Light, the poetry portion of our double-volume of John Finlay’s life work, received a thoughtful review by Micah Mattix in The Spectator: “To say that the poet John Martin Finlay has been forgotten is not quite right. He was never ‘remembered’—read by a significant number of people—in the first place. But his best work is as good as the best work of many of the poets of his time, and Wiseblood Books is hoping to set things right.”
Minor Indignities, Trevor Cribben Merrill’s debut novel, received reviews that book-ended 2021: in January, the book was reviewed by Joshua P. Hochschild in Front Porch Republic: “Trevor Cribben Merrill’s Minor Indignities shows the spiritual power of the small-man-on-campus novel.” In December, Catholic World Report published a review capturing the difficult truth that (in the words of St. Bernard) “humiliation is the way to humility”: the protagonist’s indignities “strip away the last vestiges of [his] narcissistic pride, and he comes to realize how foolish much of his behavior was and how inauthentic his search for authenticity had been.” The American Mind included Merrill’s novel in its “A Christmas Gift Guide for the Discerning Dad.” In March, Jeffrey Wald reviewed Minor Indignities for Genealogies of Modernity, wherein he remarks upon a new fictional movement that takes “the long view . . . peering straight through the center of postmodern misery to the only convincing remedy: wisdom born of suffering and endurance.”
Boundaries of Eden, by Glenn Arbery was reviewed by Chilton Williamson, Jr. in Catholic World Report: “Glenn Arbery’s Boundaries of Eden is a book set in the contemporary American South that contains, to one degree or another, every literary ingredient of the genre known as the ‘Southern novel’—as well as several associated with those of the thriller and horror ones—while dramatizing how far the New South has diverged from the Old, and the New South from its postmodern equivalent.”
In January, First Things’ editor R.R. Reno discussed his Wiseblood Essay in Contemporary Culture Duty, the Soul of Beauty: Henry James on the Beautiful Life on Conversations with Mark Bauerlein.
Pierre Manent’s Essay The Tragedy of the Republic (preface by Patrick Deneen), received several stimulating reviews, both of which expand beyond the essay’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. In Law & Liberty, Daniel J. Mahoney sees Manent’s meditation as part of “the unending search for and articulation of the common good,” and Voegelin View tries to pinpoint the tragedy that has disrupted this search: “the project of a totalitarian technocracy in which citizens are simply taken care of as opposed to being participants in civic life . . . However, since tragedy is always accompanied by the death of the hero, Manent seems to be tolling the imminent death of what has been called the managerial state.”
This past July Wiseblood hosted Sally Thomas for our annual Writer in Residence. It was an honor and a joy to work with her. Thomas is the author of a poetry collection, Motherland, a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award and published by Able Muse Press in 2020. Sally spent the Residency giving shape and depth to her first novel. Works of Mercy follows Kirsty, a woman who “was in many ways a more contented widow than I had been a wife,” as she cleans the rectory of a rural parish “for the good of my soul” and sifts through a series of strained memories. Kirsty cannot leave the unseasoned pastor to his own devices; nor can she ignore the needs of the Malkins, a sprawling parish family courting loss and chaos. At first reluctantly and eventually with abandon, Kirsty warms to the wisdom of Robert Southwell, SJ, whose poem “Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares” contains the novel’s skeleton key: Sorrowe is the Sister of Mercy. Read more about the Residency HERE, and keep your eyes wide for Works of Mercy, due out through Wiseblood in 2022.
Although I spent many of my waking and working hours co-founding and teaching in the new MFA at the University of St. Thomas, Houston (see HERE and HERE), giving public lectures and interviews on my new book How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic (see HERE and HERE), preparing for the 2022 publication of my novel Infinite Regress and my theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism (see this vanity of vanities HERE), and preparing for the birth of our fourth child in January, I continue to maintain editorial, supervisory, and promotional work with Wiseblood Books. Our editorial team is stronger than ever, thanks especially to the faithful assistance of our Managing Editor Louis Maltese, as well as the copyediting virtuosity of Mary Lang and Kate Weaver. We remain ready for another year of books! As ever, we rely on your monetary support, which underwrites our intransient commitment to publishing new books in the Catholic literary tradition. Please consider making a tax-deductible Donation of Constantine, or offering even a Widow’s Mite, HERE.
With great gratitude,
Joshua