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Last night we escaped the clutches of giant spiders in Mirkwood. My kids, aged six, five, and three, all began to run around the room shouting about spiders and elves. I shut our copy of The Hobbit and set it back on the shelf for next time. Since the kids… Read more »
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I am visiting my native Toronto after almost a year away. Having lived in Scotland for over four years, I am beginning to find remarkable aspects of Toronto life I never found remarkable before. The first, now most obvious, one is that every box, bottle, bag, jar and can in… Read more »
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“Voyage to Alpha Centauri delivers on every level.”
by Ignatius Press Novels
February 3, 2014 11:48 am Leave a Comment
Dr. Mark Nowakowski reviews Voyage to Alpha Centauri: With his most recent effort, “Voyage to Alpha Centauri,” O’Brien jumps genres into the realm of science fiction, continuing the long tradition of writing theologically meaningful sci-fi that was begun by authors such as C.S. Lewis. The comparison to Lewis is no… Read more »
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Given the opportunity, I will say to almost anyone that I think novelists take themselves far too seriously, and for that matter, some even expect to be regarded with awe. The creative engine, though a mighty machine, is easily thrown into reverse. I do not, by the way, exclude myself… Read more »
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Nike is most beautiful at the moment in which she hesitates, right hand as beautiful as a command. She leans against the wind, but her wings tremble. When I taught writing at a community college in Hamilton, Ontario, I enjoyed asking students to write down which of their five senses… Read more »
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Harry Sylvester’s “Novel of Conversion”
by Ignatius Press Novels
January 22, 2014 11:39 am Leave a Comment
Literary reputations are delicate things. An author who today is touted as the next Faulkner or Dickens can be completely forgotten in only a few years, while others rise from utter obscurity. Harry Sylvester, unfortunately, followed the first of these trajectories. He was hugely popular in the 1940s, when knowledgeable… Read more »
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The Catholicity of Catholic Literature
by Dorothy Cummings McLean
January 21, 2014 7:32 am 4 Comments
When I was last in Fetrinelli’s bookshop in Rome, I was astonished to see there the novels of Jacek Dehnel, a young Polish writer, in Italian. And when I was last in an Empik in Wrocław, I was delighted to find there Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in Polish. Naturally… Read more »
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While the mystery genre rarely (some contend never) rises to the heights of great literature, there are mystery authors who are masters (yes, masters!) at elements of the craft of writing. Arthur Conan Doyle is skillful at conveying emotional atmosphere – think about The Hound of the Baskervilles and The… Read more »
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“Transfiguration of the commonplace” is not a phrase coined by the English Catholic Rumer Godden but by the Scottish Catholic Muriel Spark. It is engraved on a stone in Lady Stair’s Close in Edinburgh to memorialize Spark among Scotland’s other great writers. Nevertheless, the phrase is a good description of… Read more »
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Happy New Year! I spent last week in a country cottage with neither internet nor television signal. Although this made for a quiet New Year’s Eve, it certainly gave me a chance to read. Among the books I brought with me from Edinburgh was an early edition of Rumer Godden’s… Read more »