fiction
I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, by Steve Earle
At a book signing,
Steve Earle was speaking when someone leaned
on a light switch and the windowless room went dark. "Did I die?" Earle asked in a quiet voice.
reviewed by Virginia Gilbert
Fictional pastors
Douglas Alan Walrath's astute survey of American novels about clergy is essential reading for budding pastors—as well as
for anybody who wants to understand why we American
clergy are the way we are.
Free for what?
Franzen has turned his considerable novelistic talents to a kind of inquisitorial examination of the American ideal of freedom. He shows how freedom is negatively construed—focused on what we are free from and not on what freedom might be for, what worthy ends it might be used to pursue.
Religion and the ridiculous: Novelist Clyde Edgerton
A critic once called Clyde Edgerton the "love child of Dave Barry and Flannery O'Connor"—a reflection of the fact that his novels are both dark and funny.
Mysteries and morals: The historical fiction of C. J. Sansom
"Man is wolf to man," said Roman playwright Plautus, and novelist C. J. Sansom seems to agree. The main character in his historical novels, detective Matthew Shardlake, repeats the ancient adage three times in Dark Fire, the second novel in the Shardlake series.Through the first-person narratives of a 16th-century lawyer, Sansom gives fictional life to a gloomy but not hopeless view of human nature.In Dissolution, the first book, King Henry VIII closes a Benedictine monastery on England's Cornish coast as part of a massive seizure of church lands and properties. In Dark Fire, Henry fears that Catholic forces may revolt with a magical concoction, a jellied petroleum akin to napalm. In the newest book, Sovereign, the king makes a grand tour of his kingdom as a display of royal might and a warning to Catholic forces in the north.
Reading with Deeper Eyes
One of the best things about William Willimon's new book is that he introduces us to serious, spiritually significant works of fiction and makes us want to read them. One of the worst is that we might be tempted to take Willimon's book as a shortcut, using his summaries of great novels as a substitute for reading them.
reviewed by Trudy Bush