Endo and the Challenge of Orthodoxy

by | Jan 8, 2017

Silence: A Novel by Shūsaku Endō, translated by William Johnston. Picador Modern Classics, 2016. Paperback, 212+xxvi pages, $16. When he was a boy, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō (1923–1996) converted to Roman Catholicism. He attended Tokyo’s Keio University after the...

Taking Things as They Are

by | Dec 1, 2016

Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly with an introduction by Stephen Mirarchi. Cluny Media, 2015. Paper, 198+xiv pages, $18. This new edition of Myles Connolly’s 1928 Catholic novella Mr. Blue invites comment on the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and American...

The Dread Beneath

by | Oct 16, 2016

The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles to Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond by Peter J. Beck. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, 408 pages, $30. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being...

A Return to the Thought-Murders

by | Jul 25, 2016

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. Viking, 2000. 233 pages.Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about the last years of philosopher-provocateur Allan Bloom, may be the best post-9/11 novel published in the year 2000. Ravelstein has as many virtues as its subject has...

Enlarging Emily Dickinson

by | Apr 11, 2016

A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn. Bellevue Literary Press, 2016. Paperback, 255 pages, $20. The first part of Jerome Charyn’s title alludes to one of Emily Dickinson’s most enigmatic and powerful poems, which begins, “My Life had...