GLENN ARBERY
Glenn Arbery grew up in the small-town South during the Civil Rights era. He attended the University of Georgia before taking his Ph.D. at the University of Dallas. He is the author of Why Literature Matters and the novels Bearings and Distances and Boundaries of Eden, along with dozens of essays and hundreds of columns. He has edited collections on the genre of tragedy, the Southern critics, and the Confessions of St. Augustine. He now lives and teaches in Wyoming with his wife, Virginia.
Praise for Boundaries of Eden
"Glenn Arbery's Boundaries of Eden is many things: a book of generations; an intertextual tour de force; an anatomy of desire (sacred and profane); a corridor of horrors; a promise of hope. It offers an unflinching assessment of the postmodern present and frank acknowledgement of our shared, often malignant past. This is a fully-realized contemporary novel situated in the Grand Tradition, notable for its author's ability to move action and character forward through fast-paced dialogue and an unusual gift for conjuring time and place through vividly realized, cinematic detail. Readers of its prequel, Bearings and Distances, will bring a special gloss to this new novel, but Boundaries of Eden stands superbly on its own, striking in its pressing topicality but informed throughout by a firm grasp of first and last things."
—William Bedford Clark, author of The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren
Praise for Bearings and Distances
"At its deepest, Bearing and Distances asks and endeavours brilliantly to answer the most difficult of questions. It grapples with the problem of pain. It asks the most painful of questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are the innocent corrupted? Why do good people become bad people? . . . It takes raw nerve to tackle such questions and it takes the exposing of raw nerves to do so successfully. In this most painfully brilliant of novels, Mr. Arbery succeeds sublimely."
--Joseph Pearce, The Imaginative Conservative
"The writing here is controlled and masterful throughout, even as the complexities of the plot multiply. For more than thirty years, Arbery has shown himself to be an exceptionally sensitive interpreter of literature and critic of the arts. See, for example, Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation (ISI, 2001) or his many razor-sharp reviews and witty editorials written for D Magazine between 2006 and 2010. So perhaps it should be no great shock that he has produced such a fine work in his first foray as a novelist, his years as a close reader of the finest literature having served as a long apprenticeship. Indeed, in the original sense of the word, Arbery has produced his masterpiece, thus marking his entrance into a new guild."
—Stephen Barnes, The Windhover
Glenn Arbery grew up in the small-town South during the Civil Rights era. He attended the University of Georgia before taking his Ph.D. at the University of Dallas. He is the author of Why Literature Matters and the novels Bearings and Distances and Boundaries of Eden, along with dozens of essays and hundreds of columns. He has edited collections on the genre of tragedy, the Southern critics, and the Confessions of St. Augustine. He now lives and teaches in Wyoming with his wife, Virginia.
Praise for Boundaries of Eden
"Glenn Arbery's Boundaries of Eden is many things: a book of generations; an intertextual tour de force; an anatomy of desire (sacred and profane); a corridor of horrors; a promise of hope. It offers an unflinching assessment of the postmodern present and frank acknowledgement of our shared, often malignant past. This is a fully-realized contemporary novel situated in the Grand Tradition, notable for its author's ability to move action and character forward through fast-paced dialogue and an unusual gift for conjuring time and place through vividly realized, cinematic detail. Readers of its prequel, Bearings and Distances, will bring a special gloss to this new novel, but Boundaries of Eden stands superbly on its own, striking in its pressing topicality but informed throughout by a firm grasp of first and last things."
—William Bedford Clark, author of The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren
Praise for Bearings and Distances
"At its deepest, Bearing and Distances asks and endeavours brilliantly to answer the most difficult of questions. It grapples with the problem of pain. It asks the most painful of questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are the innocent corrupted? Why do good people become bad people? . . . It takes raw nerve to tackle such questions and it takes the exposing of raw nerves to do so successfully. In this most painfully brilliant of novels, Mr. Arbery succeeds sublimely."
--Joseph Pearce, The Imaginative Conservative
"The writing here is controlled and masterful throughout, even as the complexities of the plot multiply. For more than thirty years, Arbery has shown himself to be an exceptionally sensitive interpreter of literature and critic of the arts. See, for example, Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation (ISI, 2001) or his many razor-sharp reviews and witty editorials written for D Magazine between 2006 and 2010. So perhaps it should be no great shock that he has produced such a fine work in his first foray as a novelist, his years as a close reader of the finest literature having served as a long apprenticeship. Indeed, in the original sense of the word, Arbery has produced his masterpiece, thus marking his entrance into a new guild."
—Stephen Barnes, The Windhover
