Things tagged literature
Novels
Articles
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Dr. Owen Whitfield is the elderly Oxford professor of history who first appeared in Michael O’Brien’s novel The Father’s Tale. In the events of The Sabbatical, which occur sometime later, Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with… Read more »
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Ethan McQuarry is a young lighthouse keeper on a tiny island, the rugged outcropping of easternmost Cape Breton Island on the Atlantic Ocean. A man without any family, he sees himself as a silent “vigilant”, performing his duties courageously year after year, with an admirable sense of responsibility. He cherishes… Read more »
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Jen Nilsson has an MBA, a nice condo, and a fast-track job at a tech startup in Silicon Valley. If her big product launch goes well next month, she may finally land the marketing director job she’s been gunning for. But then her younger sister, Katie, just out of college… Read more »
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Food crops up a lot in literature. The mushrooms and cakes in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the lovingly-depicted meal with the Beavers in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the extravagant descriptions of holiday dishes in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol all remind us that… Read more »
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This week it rained. This may not seem like an occurrence worth recording to many of you, but to those of us in this parched region of California, it was momentous. Our puppy, Snowy, had never encountered this before and had to be physically brought out into the yard to… Read more »
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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 »
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They were turning people away over at Rod Dreher’s moderately sized Walker Percy conference in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Which may come as a surprise to anyone who didn’t know there was any sort of Walker Percy conference going on anywhere. Or a Walker Percy walking bourbon tour and crawfish boil,… Read more »
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Lying there, for the few moments before Maes and the infirmarian raised him, he believed. Perhaps it was exhaustion that lowered the barriers pride and custom had long raised in him; perhaps the lucidity and intuitive accuracy of the vision he had beheld. He might never know, fully. But lying… Read more »
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A while back I participated in a discussion about art. The person who started the discussion was lamenting that in our modern world, good meaningful art was no longer being created. Everything good was in the past and the current world of art was devoid of talent and worth. Someone… Read more »
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In my last post on Suffering and Inspiration, I mentioned that an author’s life can often give birth to the ideas for their characters. There are good reasons for this. A good character is built on events and people that an author has experienced. The human experience and other humans… Read more »