The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Support the University Bookman during our annual Kirktober Fundraiser, and receive an audio copy of Kirk’s short story, What Shadows We Pursue.
Kirktober 2025: James Panero and Adam Simon on the Haunted House
October 28, 2025
On Tuesday, October 28, at 6:00 PM, you are invited to join University Bookman editor Luke Sheahan, Hollywood screenwriter Adam Simon, and New Criterion executive editor James Panero, as they explore the theme of the haunted house in gothic literature and its relationship to conservative thought and imagination.
Register for this free webinar here.
A Novel Individual: An Interview with William F. Buckley Jr. on his Fiction
Interviewed by William F. Meehan III This interview ran in The University Bookman in 1996 (vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 25-32), when Jeffrey O. Nelson, who was the journal’s editor, expertly turned the lengthy manuscript of my 90-minute interview into a coherent, polished...
Life During Wartime
To Go On Living: Stories By Narine Abgaryan. Plough, 2025. Hardcover, 220 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Michial Farmer. odern Westerners live with a delusion. We actually live with a lot of delusions, but perhaps the most insidious one is that the...
The Triumph of Love
Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature By Paul Krause. Stone Tower Press, 2024. Paperback, 227 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. oman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown is not only a classic of film noir, but it is also...
Understanding the Rest of Hemingway’s Iceberg
Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction By John Beall. Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 310 pages, $50. Reviewed by Sean C. Hadley. n Brad Paisley’s 2005 hit song, “Alcohol,” the country musician sings about...
The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien
“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”
Catholic Zen
“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”
Outlining Sanity in the Garden
“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”
Holy Living After the Fall
“At the center of this work is the sense that the world is essentially irredeemable. Individual persons assuredly may be saved, and to the attainment of this end, we all are summoned; but the world itself, with all its works and uses, is the natural property of the Devil, and we are well advised to keep away from it.”
Frontier Fiction at Its Best
“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
Smith’s claims are sobering, but they do raise important questions related to how to be religious and pass on the Christian faith in the modern age. - @PhilDavignon
We live in a world thirsty for beauty and goodness and truth. Perhaps it was always this way, and perhaps denizens of every other age felt like it was all just on the verge of slipping away. Whether this is just the normal weight of human life or not, it does feel heavy. But…
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