The Action of Grace
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 Auroras of Helen Vendler
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...
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; /...The Naked Emperors
Jews Queers Germans: A Novel/History by Martin Duberman. Seven Stories Press, 2017. Paperback, 384 pages, $20. EVE TUSHNET Martin Duberman, in his recent “novel/history” Jews Queers Germans, rarely describes clothing. He describes, instead, physical attractiveness—the...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."