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Birds of a Feather, Stories by Kaye Park HinckleyIn the past few years Kaye Park Hinckley has emerged as a major talent in what Paul Elie calls “the literature of belief.” Hinckley translates grace in a world on edge, sees a double beginning and ending in everything, literally everything, including the unspeakably awful. Like her novel A Hunger in the Heart, the stories in Birds of a Feather—several of which have won substantive awards—take us to the heart of the matter.
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The Body of This, Short Stories by Andrew McNabbAn elderly couple finally discovers the essence of each other after a lifetime together; a Sudanese immigrant uncovers the beauty in the simplicity of a new way home; a seminarian adrown in Guinness questions his calling; an eccentric muses on the existence of a prayer to a wound. These are but a few of the storylines in Andrew McNabb's ethereal debut story collection, The Body of This. With award-winning stories previously published in such esteemed and diverse literary venues as The Missouri Review and Not Safe, But Good (Best Christian Short Stories, 2007) (Thomas Nelson) The Body of This is an exploration of beginnings and endings, of architecture, the human body and what comes next. As Katy Carl contends in her introduction, McNabb is the rare writer capable of literary excellence and earnest exploration of questions and problems prompted by faith. This Wiseblood Books edition of The Body of This contains four new stories that serve as a bridge between McNabb's fictional work and his spiritual memoir Eight Days. "The collection, as the title suggests, centres on bodies, human bodies in their various functions, relationships and ages, but also the bodies of buildings (which 'evolve' and 'breathe'), and the natural body of the created world. The tensions these stories recount (and generate in the reader) include those between the natural and the artificial, between being young and being old, being healthy and being sick, being rich and being poor, belonging to small city America (the stories are set in Portland, Maine) and not belonging there because one is a foreigner, is crippled, or is socially inept." —Vivian Boland, review in New Blackfriars "The Body of This is a tough little bundle of shards that can as easily cut and make you bleed as it can reflect the one true light . . . Andrew McNabb is a brave storyteller." —Bret Lott, author of Oprah's Book Club pick, Jewel |
Cave Art, Poems by Charles HughesThirty nine of the forty poems that comprise this collection have been previously published in literary and other magazines, including America, the Anglican Theological Review, Dappled Things, First Things, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, The Rotary Dial, the Sewanee Theological Review, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere.
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No Time To Be Lost: A Screenplay by Christopher YatesNo Time To Be Lost : A Screenplay by Christopher Yates.
When a band of academic philosophers set out to save their careers, and the world, mind and body mix up a batch of pure mayhem. Avery Meir’s Ph.D. is in the bag, but jobs for philosophers are scarce and the suffering of the world is vast. When the keynote speaker at an academic gathering in Florida collapses in the midst of a stirring philosophical call for ‘peace and justice,’ the mantle of social relevance falls to Avery and her ragtag band of budding activists. Lest the spotlight swing to the dilettante French rival, Simone Marseilles (seductive siren of the European scene), Avery and her crew deputize themselves guardians of all things marginalized, and take their message of intellectual redemption to the streets. Their emerging search for the world’s ‘most oppressed’ carries them from the local to the global then back again, all on the dime of an enterprising micro-brew magnate who is himself in need of a little deliverance. With Homeland Security on their tail and academic reputations in the balance, they wager everything on one last push to do just a little bit of good in the world. This edition includes interior illustrations by Dominic Heisdorf and an introduction by Cheston Knapp, Managing Editor of Tin House. Suggested Retail Price: $16.50 |
The Catholic Writer Today, by Dana GioiaDana Gioia's The Catholic Writer Today is the inaugural work in our Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture. When it first appeared in First Things, The Catholic Writer Today was instantly recognized as a classic. Here for the first time is the full text of Gioia’s influential essay, a text which confronts the paradoxical fact that, though Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholic writers are currently almost invisible in American public culture. After establishing a lucid definition of Catholic literature, Gioia examines the decline in Catholic literary culture since its great rise in the mid-twentieth century. He challenges Catholic writers to reoccupy and repair their great tradition. "Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today sets a mighty finger on the scales of literature: on the one side what matters and lasts, and on the other what’s shallow and doesn’t. This electrifying essay is a guide for the perplexed; its arguments about Catholic literature could be applied to American writing in general. Without the complications of tradition and history – the history of meaning – what’s left?"--Cynthia Ozick |
The Oracles Fell Silent, by Lee OserThe Oracles Fell Silent by Lee Oser: When the legendary Sir Ted Pop hires young Richard Bellman as his secretary, Bellman’s work on the great man’s memoir transforms his young life into a divine comedy—or is it a devilish farce? In a New York beach house in Southampton, Bellman treads the forbidden ground of Ted’s final hour with Johnny Donovan, his partner in fame, who “fell” from a London rooftop in 1969. Sir Ted battles false prophets and mad messiahs for control over his own story, but what rock’s biggest mystery reveals to Bellman is the unthinkable hand of God.
“You think Johnny understood his fate when he fell? You think you understand your fate, or I understand mine? Your story will be written, all right, but not by you. It will be written by someone you could never buy, and you wouldn’t like the narrative. Not that it matters, but you would scarcely recognize yourself, not since you lost your soul on its great crusade to nowhere.” Suggested Retail Price: $16.50 |
Sand, Smoke, Current, by Robert Vander LugtSand, Smoke, Current is a collection of short stories written by award-winning author Robert Vander Lugt, whose work is steeped in down-to-earth profundity, are driven by conflicts that beg characters to strip away pretense in favor of a freedom obtained by unflinching acceptance of weakness and grace. Vander Lugt's prose is melancholic without being depressing, humorous without getting tangled in sarcastic irony, and his pen probes the bigger questions at every turn.
"Like letters of encouragement penned by a divine hand, the best of these stories read like parables of a parallel universe . . . Wise, unearthly, and other-worldly stories by an author with feet planted squarely on the ground and an eye cocked toward heaven." — Mark Richard, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World and a bestselling novel Fishboy. Suggested Retail Price: $15.50 |
A Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales of the Appalachian Foothills, by Geoffrey SmagaczA Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales of the Appalachian Foothills
As the Russian great Anton Chekov infamously noted, when a loaded rifle appears on page one, it absolutely must go off. In A Waste of Shame Geoffrey Smagacz does not ignore this dramatic principle. Before the last page is turned, someone sadly pulls the trigger. Smagacz debuts a short novel and an accompanying collection of short stories written in a vein that carries the blood of Hemingway, Wodehouse, Nathaniel West, and Sherwood Anderson. Enter a small town where tragedy collides with fish fry cooks, soap-opera addicts, and the convenient but strained friendships of youth. Minimalist through and through, this is literary fiction that scrupulously avoids being literary. He puts the bullet through my head, says something like, "Brought him down with one shot," watches my body spasm for a few moments as blood pours out of my skull, and then says to Don, "You say anything and I'll blow your head off, too," or something like that. At least that's what I thought he might do after I said I was going back to the farmhouse. Why the heck did I go into the woods with them in the first place? - from A Waste of Shame Suggested Retail Price $16.50 |
A Flower in the Heart of the Painting, by Amy KrohnA Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a collection of short stories by award-winning author Amy Krohn. Set almost exclusively in the rural heart of the Midwest, A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is populated by a cast of quiet characters whose land and interior lives are brought into full relief. Like Tolstoi and Cather, Krohn draws us into unassuming, ordinary dramas in order to reveal that, in spite of our best efforts to live compartmentalized, comfortable lives loosened from the transcendent, everything is at stake. The heart of the collection is “A Portrait of Happiness and Love,” a hundred page novella modeled after Tolstoi's short novel Family Happiness. In each story idealized marriages are tested, drained of false romanticism and yet, as Krohn's narrator notes, “What love we shared had suffered blows, and yet, bent and wounded, it grew upward, fiercer than before.” Praise for A Flower in the Heart of the Painting "Amy Krohn's A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a strongly cohesive, quietly intense collection of stories, graceful in every sense of the word. Her characters face a variety of situations, wrestling with some of the most challenging mysteries of romance and fulfilled love, family and faith, childhood and maturity. Yet uniting the stories is a firm focus on art—not as mere escape or ornament but as a life-changing, spirit-filled, identifying endeavor. Krohn writes beautifully, with delicately evocative language throughout, not to mention penetrating observation and psychological depth. A very fine debut."—Professor David Graham, author of After Confession, Stutter Monk, and Greatest Hits "Amy Krohn’s stories are carefully drawn portraits—life studies if you will—of ordinary men and women who inhabit the rural landscapes of Wisconsin. These are inward-turning stories, 'Where the Meanings, are–' as Emily Dickinson says. Krohn renders her subjects and themes with delicate brush strokes, with the control and precision of a water colorist. These stories are acts of faith and hope. As one of her narrators says, 'Isn’t art the act of creation, after all? As God speaks the world into existence, so the artist extracts her own world from an empty place.' She easily could be speaking of Amy Krohn's fiction."—Thom Tammaro, editor, Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest and Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest. |
The Unfinished Life of N. by Micah CawberIn the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, The Unfinished Life of N. scrutinizes the quiet ambitions of normal people, their everyday fictions concerning others' and their own humanity and goodness, as it follows Nafula, the innocent but not naïve protagonist, from the backwoods of Wisconsin to AIDS-stricken regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and, after a rehabilitation program at a Mental Health home, a chance encounter forces her to reckon with the the terrible speed of mercy. Review of The Unfinished Life of N.: “How many worlds are there?” asks Nafula, the protagonist of Micah Cawber’s fine new novel, The Unfinished Life of N. "Three", responds her mother, adamant about the much belabored division between First and Third Worlds. Nafula, "she who comes with the rain," is a woman whose life has been wrenched from the machinery through which all our lives must turn. After traveling from Wisconsin to Africa and back, Nafula is able to see what we, who are so deeply invested in that machinery, are unable to see: the world of “the information orgy” that is contemporary living. The Unfinished Life of N. is the kind of fiction described by Chesterton as a necessity—necessary because it reveals what is beautiful and true in the world. Nafula continues her line of questioning: "Where does one world end and the other begin?" While it is easy to respond in the geopolitical terms by which the question is framed, the possibility for a much greater awareness is at stake. There are, for example, public worlds and private worlds, but they are all part of the one world we all share, through which all our other worlds are made. Cawber, through Nafula, is able to help us see these worlds anew; read this book, and understand again "the wrestle of body and word" by which real meaning might be made of our lives.—Brian Jobe, author of Bird's Nest in Your Hair |
Wiseblood Classics
* Unlike many reproduced classics, Wiseblood's Classics are carefully edited and designed, and, most of all, readable.
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Paradise in The Waste Land: Early Works by T.S. Eliot, Introduction by Jeremiah WebsterSuggested Retail Price: $12.00
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Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, by Thomas More St. Thomas More wrote his masterpiece DIALOGUE OF COMFORT AGAINST TRIBULATION during the last fifteen months of his life, months spent imprisoned in the Tower of London as he awaited execution for treason in 1535. Second only to King Henry VIII, More was a man with much to live for. He had wealth, position, and a very happy home life; he certainly did not desire a martyr's death. He wrote this DIALOGUE in hopes that he might persuade himself to compromise his conscience, and so preserve his life and station. Assuming the form of a conversation between two cousins in war-torn Hungary, under the threat of Turkish invasion, the DIALOGUE explores the prospect of Christian suffering and death. Wise old Anthony counsels his troubled younger cousin Vincent, who asks what a Christian ought to do in the face of slavery and death, how one is to endure the daily fear and sadness that accompany the mere threat of slavery and death. Through patient conversation, Anthony develops a lesson on the acquisition and cultivation of virtue, markedly the virtue of fortitude. This Dialogue exhibits the cheerful humor, artful styling, and depth of thought that mark all the works of St. Thomas More; a true saint for the modern age.
This Wiseblood Classics edition was carefully edited by Charles Schmitt. Suggested Retail Price: $12.00 |
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Painting the Novel: The Fine Art of Fiction in Henry James's PrefacesA Collection of Henry James Prefaces
"The beautiful gift of the Prefaces is this: in their documentation of perpetual artistic striving they lucidly illustrate the lack of perfection this side of heaven; but in the same breath they remind us there is, in life lived with intensity and life observed with acuity, an artfulness of life that at least parallels the beatific vision . . . And thus the art of fiction proves its moral importance. In light of this it is no wonder that James took his avocation as a 'painter of life' so seriously. All aspiring writers would do well to emulate his example; and in a world where illusion and virtual experience continue to pass for, and even increasingly take the place of, human life lived in connection with other humans, we might all live life better if we allowed ourselves to be changed by frequent walks alongside this great painter. For if it is in part by images or fancies that we live, James will teach us how to purify the picture." —From the Introduction by Angela Cybulski, M.A. |
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The Eternal Husband by DostoevskyAnswering a late-night knock at the door, a man finds himself face to face with the husband of a former lover. But he is stunned by an awful question: does the husband know of the affair? The story's antimony is embodied in the eternal husband's conflict with the eternal lover. These two rivals, these deep enemies, are paradoxically similar. Unable to tolerate one another, neither can they do without one another. This is in part because, as René Girard observes in his indispensable Resurrection From the Underground, “In The Eternal Husband the wife is dead, the object desired has disappeared, and the rival remains. The essential character of the obstacle is fully disclosed.” In the husband's eyes, because the lover fooled and ridiculed him thoroughly he contains the essence of seduction, an essence he finds absent in himself. The husband thus seeks to make himself the companion, emulator, and rival of his opponent, and we soon find that “the most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.”
Translated by Constance Garnett. Suggested retail price:$7.25 |
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BeowulfBeowulf, the Old English heroic-epic poem, tells of Beowulf, a prince of the Geatas, who voyages to Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes; there he destroys a monster Grendel, who for twelve years has haunted the hall by night and slain all he found therein. When Grendel's mother in revenge makes an attack on the hall, Beowulf seeks her out and kills her also in her home beneath the waters. He then returns to his land with honour and is rewarded by his king Hygelac. Ultimately he himself becomes king of the Geatas, and fifty years later slays a dragon and is slain by it. The poem closes with an account of the funeral rites. Fantastic as these stories are, they are depicted against a background of what appears to be fact. Incidentally, and in a number of digressions, we receive much information about the Geatas, Swedes and Danes: all which information has an appearance of historic accuracy, and in some cases can be proved, from external evidence, to be historically accurate.
This Wiseblood Classics edition contains an introductory essay by G.K. Chesterton and an extensive excerpt from a study of Beowulf by R.W. Chambers, J.R.R. Tolkien's patron and supporter in the now famous author's early years. Chambers' works on Beowulf deeply influenced Tolkien's own seminal essay on the poem, "The Monsters and the Critics." Chambers wrestles with the Christian elements of this great epic. Translated by Francis Gummere. |
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Callista: A Tale of the Third Century, by John Henry Newman In CALLISTA: A TALE OF THE THIRD CENTURY John Henry Newman brings the riches of his intellect and imagination to bear upon the the Roman colony of Sicca Veneria in North Africa, circa 250 of the common era. Persecution is far from most Christians' living memory. Priests and bishops have grown lukewarm in matters of faith and preoccupied with matters of business. In celebration of the Roman millenium, Emperor Decius decrees that all citizens must pay homage to Rome by swearing by the genius of the Emperor and worshipping Jove. Against this backdrop Newman's novel dramatizes Pagan-Christian conflicts of great consequence through the interwoven fates of three main characters: Agellius, a Christian farmer of Roman descent; Caecilius Cyprianus, the persecuted Bishop of Carthage; and Callista, a Greek decorator of sculptures. Together they must reckon with the most pressing problems of tolerance and exclusivity, conversion and martyrdom.
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The Bostonians, by Henry James The rising tide of equality and freedom in America's burgeoning democracy . . . the inherently abstract and therefore often ambiguous quality of freedoms and equalities . . . the persistent presence of a seemingly archaic but ever-perceptive aristocratic perspective . . . With measure and complexity Henry James tackles all of the above in his tragic-comic political novel THE BOSTONIANS.
The plot revolves around one of those triangles of desire so familiar in the great works of literature—from Stendhal to Dostoevsky, Katherine Anne Porter to Walker Percy. In THE BOSTONIANS we have Olive, a vehement bohemian humanitarian bent on bringing the young and talented Verena under her influence. Olive's wealth allows the impressionable Verena to become a star lecturer on the radical feminist lecture circuit. Enter Olive's cousin Basil, an ex-Confederate soldier from Mississippi come north to escape poverty and find good work. The "progressive" Olive and the "conservative" Basil vie for Verena amidst a panorama of activists, journalists, and eccentrics as James probes the psychological and political dilemmas of democracy with characteristic detail and acumen. This Wiseblood Classics edition includes excerpts from Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that heighten the reader's attentiveness to problems of liberty and servitude, equality and difference. Suggested Retail Price $13.00 |
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Pascal's Pensées "'The heart has reasons which the mind does not understand.' How often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the 'heart' over the 'head,' a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal's terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart. For him, in theological matters, which seemed to him much larger, more difficult, and more important than scientific matters, the whole personality is involved."
—From the Introduction by T.S. Eliot Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) left his Pensées incomplete at his death, but the meanings these "thoughts" contain continue to be resurrected. Herein he sets forth a defense of the Christian faith that directly incorporates skepticism and stoicism, that confronts infinity and nothingness, intuition and analysis, being and death, boredom and despair. Amidst all of these thoroughly modern problems lies Pascal's infamous wager: to have faith in God's existence or not. Suggested Retail Price $13.00 |
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The Betrothed, by Alessandro ManzoniAlessandro Manzoni
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Family Happiness, by Lev Tolstoyby Lev Tolstoy
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O Pioneers! by Willa Catherby Willa Cather
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Discovering the Detectives Three Mystery Storiesby Edgar Allan Poe
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The Princess Casamassima, by Henry Jamesby Henry James
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Essays on Political EconomyFrédéric Bastiat
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The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, by Karl MarxKarl Marx
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Dead Souls, by Nikolai GogolNikolai Gogol
Translated by D.J. Hoggarth. Suggested Retail Price: $7.00 |
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by FreudSigmund Freud Suggested Retail Price: $12.25 |
Sickness Unto DeathSøren Kierkegaard
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Philosophy of MindG.W.F. Hegel Suggested Retail Price: $10.00 |
The Comedienne by W.S RemontWladislaw Remont Suggested Retail Price: $9.13 |
The Damned, J.K. Huysmans The Damned (Là-Bas) follows Durtal, a spiritually-sensitive man who is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century child-murderer, and supposed model for "Bluebeard." Bored by the bourgeois banality of his age, Durtal seeks spiritual intensity by immersing himself in another age. Madame Chantelouve draws him into the underground world of Satanism in fin-de-siècle Paris, where, in the heart of darkness, he starts to see the light.
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