Properly Dangerous Ideas

Properly Dangerous Ideas

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.00 Chris Butynskyi Ideas are dangerous. Most people would agree that a certain level of danger and harm can take root in ideas. Culture, too, is dangerous....
Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury in the Afternoon

Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan R. Eller. University of Illinois Press, 2020. Hardcover, 336 pages. $35. Reviewed by James E. Person Jr. Anyone who considers the life and career of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is eventually struck by a remarkable fact: although the...
Beha’s Capacity for God: Sophie Wilder Revisited

Beha’s Capacity for God: Sophie Wilder Revisited

What Happened to Sophie Wilder: A Novel by Christopher R. Beha. Tin House Books, 2012. Paperback, 253 pages, $16. Reviewed by Joshua Hren In his new novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, Harper’s editor Christopher Beha makes grace a noisome concern, not least...
Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?

Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. Grove Press, 2018. Paperback, 320 pages, $17. Reviewed by Matt Miller Small towns in American fiction have a history as varied as the landscapes they inhabit. Often stifling or enervating, as in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood...
Lines of Descent

Lines of Descent

Old House of Fear: A Novel by Russell Kirk, introduction by James Panero. Criterion Books, [1961] 2019. Paperback, 264 pages, $19. Reviewed by Jeremy Seaton Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear recounts Hugh Logan’s trip from Michigan to Carnglass, a scarcely known island...