Stories of the Lost, Wandering Soul of Modern America

Stories of the Lost, Wandering Soul of Modern America

Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories by Thomas McGuane. Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Cloth, 354 pages, $35. JAMES E. PERSON JR. The short stories of Thomas McGuane can be summarized in the words of John Gay’s self-chosen epitaph: “Life is a jest, and all things shew it; /...

Kirk and the Hope for Recovery

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics by Russell Kirk, with an introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Cluny Media, 2016. Paper, 399 pages, $20. At the apex of the mid-twentieth-century Youth Movement, the year 1969 marked...

Hope for a Conservative Remnant

The Conservative Rebellion by Richard Bishirjian. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Hardcover, 171 pages, $25. One of the more common definitions of conservatism as stated by its critics is that it is a philosophy enthralled with preserving the status quo. This definition...

‘I Think I Have Made Poetry’

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 811 pages, $45. In a conversation with the late literary scholar Peter J. Stanlis about ten years ago, Stanlis...