Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven. Michigan State University Press, 2018. Paperback, 346 pages, $30. Reviewed by Patrick Kurp In their 1941 short feature In the Sweet Pie and Pie, Larry, Curly, and Moe are ex-cons hoping to marry three...
David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose ed. Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen, and Kathleen Henderson Staudt. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Cloth, xviii + 347 pages, $176. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz David Jones (1895–1974) is acknowledged...
This Our Exile: Short Stories by Joshua Hren. Angelico Press, 2017. Hardcover, 131 pages, $22. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill The twelve stories in this slender but powerful volume bring the everyday and the eternal together in compressed, often dreamlike sequences,...
The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: essays on poets & poetry by Helen Vendler. Harvard University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 444 pages, $35. DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar opens with a twelve-page account of her life as a...
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; /...
