Novel Thoughts blog
  1. Ignatius Press Novels

    Chesterton in Love

    February 11, 2015 5:39 pm 4 Comments

    St. Valentine’s Day is coming up, and thoughts of love are in the air. Now, he may not be the first figure to spring to mind when thinking of romance, but here he is anyway: G.K. Chesterton. He was an incurable romantic, and spent years of his life wooing his… Read more »

    Tags: G.K. Chesterton joseph pearce love poetry romance

  2. Roger Thomas

    Love as Magic vs. Love as the Center of Life

    February 9, 2015 1:53 pm 3 Comments

    It doesn’t take much perception to see that in modern culture, romantic love is considered magic. Not merely “magical”, in the sense of a pleasant poetic attribute of a relationship, but actual magic, in the full sense that any true magician ever used the term. This is never articulated in… Read more »

    Tags: J.R.R. Tolkien L.M. Montgomery Michael Richard Roger Thomas romance Sigrid Undset

  3. John Herreid

    Shades of Reality

    February 4, 2015 12:28 pm Leave a Comment

    One of the weaknesses of Christians when it comes to being challenged by trashy media is that they often spring to creating “alternatives”—generally works on the same theme or in the same mode as the garbage being counteracted, but with a Christian gloss. These works are almost always bad, ham-fisted,… Read more »

    Tags: love stories novels reading lists

  4. John Herreid

    “I do not write Catholic books intentionally.”

    January 28, 2015 10:54 am 5 Comments

    This is an interview from last year, but why should time matter? Especially when it involves the notoriously tricksy, almost unclassifiable science fiction writer Gene Wolfe. When many lament the state of Catholic literature these days, they almost always forget and leave out the great Catholic writers working in genre… Read more »

    Tags: Catholic writers fantasy fulton sheen gene wolfe genre fiction science fiction speculative fiction

  5. Roger Thomas

    A Good Ending Is Hard to Find

    January 26, 2015 6:34 pm 8 Comments

    I’m going to run a risk and admit something in public that I’ve hitherto just bandied in private conversations. I do this understanding that I may be marched out to the middle of the hollow square and have my Catholic author’s buttons off and my stripes cut away, but that’s… Read more »

    Tags: C.S. Lewis Evelyn Waugh Flannery O'Connor Graham Greene Holly Ordway J.R.R. Tolkien literary criticism Michael Richard Roger Thomas T.M. Doran Walker Percy

  6. Meryl Kaleida

    Truly Odd, but Truly Great

    January 21, 2015 11:55 am 3 Comments

    It is with great sadness that I review this last installment of the Odd Thomas series. I’m sad because Oddie became one of my best friends and now there are no more adventures with him… at least in this life. Koontz created one of the best literary characters and has… Read more »

    Tags: book reviews Dean Koontz novels Odd Thomas Saint Odd

  7. John Herreid

    Catholic Literature’s Bill of Health

    January 20, 2015 10:01 am 1 Comment

    Over at Catholic World Report, Carl Olson talks with Dana Gioia (we talked about him here previously) about the upcoming “Future of the Catholic Imagination” conference that will be held in February at the University of Southern California. Says Gioia: We are bringing hundreds of writers, teachers, and intellectuals together… Read more »

    Tags: Artur Rosman Carl Olson Catholicism Dana Gioia Gregory Wolfe IMAGE Journal literature Piers Paul Read

  8. John Herreid

    G. K. Chesterton: The Tame Oracle?

    January 16, 2015 9:05 am 10 Comments

    G.K. Chesterton loved to argue. He argued with his family, he argued with his friends, he argued his enemies into becoming his friends. His infectious delight in argument won over some other prominent literary figures who were determined to dislike the man. They found that he had no qualms being… Read more »

    Tags: criticism G.K. Chesterton Henri de Lubac media

  9. Rose Trabbic

    I recently read a novel by an author I knew nothing about: Shadows and Images by Meriol Trevor. Meriol Trevor lived from 1919–2000. She was educated at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford. It turns out that she was one of the most prolific Catholic writers of the twentieth century, writing… Read more »

    Tags: Europe historical fiction Jane Austen John Henry Newman Louis de Wohl love Meriol Trevor Oxford Movement Regency novels

  10. John Herreid

    Creativity Is Work

    January 9, 2015 3:54 pm 6 Comments

    I’m fortunate. Much of my day job includes creative work, including graphic design, illustration, and writing. So even when I don’t have time at the end of the day to work on personal projects, I usually still had some small bit of creative work to look back on. (The unfortunate… Read more »

    Tags: creativity design work process writing

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