Friday Links
June 23, 2023
Everything Old is New Again: A.E. Stallings and This Afterlife
A Cloak of Fiction by Trevor Cribben Merrill
Gary Saul Morson on Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It?
A Catholic Mom’s Epic Journey of Creating Art
Lee Oser: What is the Relationship Between Books and a Healthy Culture?
Everything Old is New Again: A.E. Stallings and This Afterlife
Ethan McGuire reviews (the newly appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry) A.E. Stallings’ This Afterlife: Selected Poems for Literary Matters. Read the review and buy the book!
“A Cloak of Fiction” by Trevor Cribben Merrill
In this essay Merrill reviews Elif Batuman’s new novel, Either/Or, in light of Flannery O’Connor’s prophetic warning that “the separation of matter and spirit, nature and grace, was fatal to the art of fiction.” It’s an excellent essay and well worth your time.
Gary Saul Morson on Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It?
In this essay on Joseph Epstein’s new book, Gary Saul Morson touches on some of the same themes that Merrill does in his First Things essay: how ideological capture destroys the novel (and all art):
Today, ideological conformity threatens the genre. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of a destructive “climate of fear” engendered by political correctness and online lynch mobs. And in fact young ideologues are right to despise novels, which show what is wrong with their simplistic worldview and instruct them to seek the evil and self-deception lurking in their own souls. They demand what novels reject: a simple message. Epstein explains: “Esau sold his birthright, it will be recalled, for a mess of pottage, but the politically tendentious novelist is willing to sell his or hers for a pot of message.”
A Catholic Mom’s Epic Journey of Creating Art
Simcha Fisher on artist Sarah Breisch’s long journey to art.
Lee Oser: What is the Relationship Between Books and a Healthy Culture?
This is the first essay of three (so far) between Lee Oser and Jessica Hooten Wilson in which they debate: “What is the Relationship between Books and a Healthy Culture?” JHW’s response to this essay and Oser’s response to JHW can both be found on this same page. It’s an interesting discussion. I you have thoughts, please share them with us.
