Here’s a sampling of what’s been going on in the literary and Catholic world recently.

• CatholicFiction.net reviews Meriol Trevor’s Shadows and Images, calling it “a deeply moving love story, beautifully written” with “echoes of Jane Austen”. It also has more than an echo of Bl. John Henry Newman’s conversion story, which the reviewer notes interest in “as an Anglo-Catholic” herself. Read it all here.
• Of all things, Amazon has gotten in the literary journal market with Day One, a Kindle-exclusive weekly that puts out a short story and poem each issue–and costs real money! The idea of Amazon encroaching on turf traditionally held by nonprofit and independent journals has raised some hackles, though it’s also obviously put a spotlight on Kindle as an e-magazine delivery service. The field is currently fragmented, with magazines who have made the digital leap going through Apple’s Newsstand, independent apps, and their own websites.
• Over at Catholic World Report, the author-brother duo Ted and Dana Gioia sit down with Carl Olson to discuss the connections between their Catholic faith and creative lives. It’s their first interview done together, and serves as a good roundtable on Catholicism and the arts. Dana is a poet who revolutionized the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 2000s as chairman, while Ted is the author of several notable critical histories of music and a recording jazz musician.
• Maureen Mullarkey has penned a post over at First Things taking on the beloved slogan, adopted by many Christian artists, “Beauty will save the world.” Drawn from Dostoevsky, the phrase represents to Mullarkey a confusion of art’s purpose, worked out on the left and the right in different and, she maintains, intrinsically precarious ways. A short, challenging read.
• An unpublished Flannery O’Connor story has been getting some special attention (the link introduces and links to her story, “The Barber”)–just in time for the release of her prayer journal, which has made a welcome splash.