Bøger udgivet af Wiseblood Books

If artists are no longer able to fall back on the explanatory power of familiar grand narratives, or to lift up, within a story's scope, any single perspective as the key to reality, how can literature make good sense of life? What possibilities still await realistic fiction, given that earlier conventions of realism are widely received, today, as contrived, overdone, and insupportable? While walking the skeptic's tightrope, fiction writers must still find ways to recover the enduring virtues of fiction-to create sympathy between character and reader so as to truthfully render common human experience against the fragmentations of a postmodern world. Faced with the inherent limitations of fictional technique-and an audience trained to be hyper-conscious and even cynical in the face of those limitations-novelist Christopher Beha nevertheless finds ways to re-enliven the aesthetic quest to represent real life in an amorphous age. The consequential weight of free will and the restless longing for transcendence do not dissolve into lost illusions; instead, they turn out to be as demonstrably present to Beha's characters as the smooth pane of a window or the polished handle of a car door. As Beha's novels achieve an outward turn, freeing characters from solipsistic self-focus, they also move toward locales and liturgies widely supposed to be empty of any metaphysical reality-only to find these empty places uncannily occupied.

"We must listen carefully to Bernanos to learn how love and indignation, obedience and a critical spirit, can interpenetrate fruitfully in a . . . heart."-Hans Urs von Balthasar"The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters' souls are on the line."-Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book AwardGeorges Bernanos' first novel Under Satan's Sun grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and does not let go no matter the burn. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his Church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that come into play in the priest's fateful encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was one of the twentieth century's most forceful and idiosyncratic writers and perhaps the most original Roman Catholic writer of his time. He wrote most of his major fiction in a period of barely twelve years, between 1926 and 1937, including his best-known work, The Diary of a Country Priest. ABOUT THE TRANSLATORJ. C. Whitehouse (R.I.P.) was Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos and the translator of many books, including Bernanos's The Impostor.

A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a collection of short stories by award-winning author Amy Krohn. Set almost exclusively in the rural heart of the Midwest, A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is populated by a cast of quiet characters whose land and interior lives are brought into full relief. Like Tolstoi and Cather, Krohn draws us into unassuming, ordinary dramas in order to reveal that, in spite of our best efforts to live compartmentalized, comfortable lives loosened from the transcendent, everything is at stake. The heart of the collection is "A Portrait of Happiness and Love," a hundred page novella modeled after Tolstoi's short novel Family Happiness. In each story idealized marriages are tested, drained of false romanticism and yet, as Krohn's narrator notes, "What love we shared had suffered blows, and yet, bent and wounded, it grew upward, fiercer than before."Praise for A Flower in the Heart of the Painting"Amy Krohn's A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a strongly cohesive, quietly intense collection of stories, graceful in every sense of the word. Her characters face a variety of situations, wrestling with some of the most challenging mysteries of romance and fulfilled love, family and faith, childhood and maturity. Yet uniting the stories is a firm focus on art-not as mere escape or ornament but as a life-changing, spirit-filled, identifying endeavor. Krohn writes beautifully, with delicately evocative language throughout, not to mention penetrating observation and psychological depth. A very fine debut."-Professor David Graham, author of After Confession, Stutter Monk, and Greatest Hits"Amy Krohn's stories are carefully drawn portraits-life studies if you will-of ordinary men and women who inhabit the rural landscapes of Wisconsin. These are inward-turning stories, 'Where the Meanings, are-' as Emily Dickinson says. Krohn renders her subjects and themes with delicate brush strokes, with the control and precision of a water colorist. These stories are acts of faith and hope. As one of her narrators says, 'Isn't art the act of creation, after all? As God speaks the world into existence, so the artist extracts her own world from an empty place.' She easily could be speaking of Amy Krohn's fiction."-Thom Tammaro, editor, Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest and Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest.

In these stories, characters' bodies trouble their souls, stirring questions about why we are here and how we are to live. Confronted by their own vulnerabilities, they must also contend with the weaknesses of those they want to love. Will they find their trust well placed; will they rise to moments of grace-or will their lives crack under pressure? These stories seek to do justice in art to the human condition's real, though fleeting, gifts-to our much-explored, but only ever partially understood, potential for comic resolution, tragic failure, and the substance of things hoped for between the two.

In Utopia of Usurers G.K. Chesterton takes to task the theoretical and practical fallout of laissez-faire capitalism. The book invites all comers to reconsider their ideological prejudices concerning "conservative" love of the free market. As Chesterton argues in "The Superstition of Divorce":"Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family. It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as 'individual.' If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline . . . these individualists will redistribute it in the form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms."Either our times are ripe for Utopia of Usurers, or Utopia of Usurers is ripe for our times.

Known as the "Phoenix of the Americas" and "The Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a scholar, poet, and cloistered nun. Her poetry, like her singular life, is fired with intensity and intelligence. Neither life in a convent nor the strictures of time and place could bind Sor Juana's thirst for knowledge or her creativity. As Sally Read notes in her introduction, when reading about Sor Juana and her work "one has the sense of a woman who pours out poetry as a tight faucet shoots out high-pressure water. The time in which Juana was born, and the culture of New Spain, were the constricting faucet; her writing was the irrepressible flood."Translating Juana's work into English carries a grave risk, for it would be far too easy to drown in the flow of imagery, music, and wit. With her innate sensitivity and deft craft, Rhina P. Espaillat is one of the few poets capable of navigating us through the "irrepressible flood" and safely onto the luxurious shores of Sor Juana's work. This book represents the confluence of two poets, each extraordinary in her own right, who have joined together over time to create a work that overflows with the enchantments essential to verse-music, metaphor, and meaning.Review:"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's verse exhibited a mastery of form, together with an abundance of serious wit, that made it impossible to deny the poet her rightful place in a culture dead set on denying it. Her gifts and skills continue to open minds and, to borrow one of her own images, to render them opulent by learning. Now the great Rhina P. Espaillat, a poet every bit as gifted and skilled as Sor Juana, has rendered the nun's deathless poems in all their perfectly measured opulence. An encounter with these sparkling translations will leave readers doubly enriched."-BORIS DRALYUK, award-winning translator, critic, and author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

"Charles Hughes can see and say things exactly. In 'Signs, ' for instance, 'Blotches of snow in March' look like 'the candle wax / Left over from a party, dirty white / Beneath today's strong sun.' The subjects of his poems range from the modestly domestic (as in 'Mornings after Thirty-Eight Years, ' a portrait of a long, happy marriage) to the gravely historical (as in 'Easter Spoils, 2012, ' a moving meditation on the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the title poem of Cave Art, Hughes speaks of 'dazzling life that . . . still survives as art and evidence, ' and this could serve as a description of the book itself." --Timothy Steele "The poems in Charles Hughes's quietly assured first book are alive with a thoughtful curiosity and an impartial eye. Charged with the insights of a patiently-led inner life, they amplify the day-to-day particulars of his world: a suburban block, Chicago mass transit, river and woods, the passage of seasons in snow or sun, and the corresponding seasons, severe or clement, of life. But, whether they are dark, like 'The River's Gift' or gently loving like 'November Song, ' the poems in this book intelligently capture the saving importance of love, memory, and language. " --Joshua Mehigan "In these beautiful, moving poems, Charles Hughes unearths the 'stark, dazzling' artifacts, if you will, of a past that 'still survives as art and evidence, ' in the words of the marvelous title poem, the words of a keen, big-hearted observer and a gifted craftsman. Cave Art is a wonderful, rewarding debut." --Greg Williamson A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Hughes was born in Chicago, Illinois. He earned a B.A. from Augustana College, in Rock Island, Illinois, as well as a J.D. from Northwestern University, and worked as a lawyer for thirty-three years before his retirement. His poems have appeared in America, the Anglican Theological Review, Dappled Things, First Things, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, The Rotary Dial, the Sewanee Theological Review, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in the Chicago area.

***OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE: JANUARY 1, 2014*** Sand, Smoke, Current is a collection of short stories written by award-winning author Robert Vander Lugt, whose work is steeped in down-to-earth profundity, are driven by conflicts that beg characters to strip away pretense in favor of a freedom obtained by unflinching acceptance of weakness and grace. Vander Lugt's prose is melancholic without being depressing, humorous without getting tangled in sarcastic irony, and his pen probes the bigger questions at every turn. "Like letters of encouragement penned by a divine hand, the best of these stories read like parables of a parallel universe . . . Wise, unearthly, and other-worldly stories by an author with feet planted squarely on the ground and an eye cocked toward heaven." - Mark Richard, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World and a bestselling novel Fishboy. Robert Vander Lugt's characters share a certain uncertainty in a fashion that not only makes them shadowy, somehow less (or more) than real, but also lends the stories a fable-like feel, both compelling and mysterious. Don't get me wrong. Time and place is very real in these stories-we're with him on the lake front, often in the company of boys becoming men. But the outlines are indistinct enough for all of us to find a place beside them on the beach, in the home, with the family. Vander Lugt's people are never anti-heroes, unusual in this era; but neither are they fanciful. It wasn't hard to find myself in this compelling collection of tales. Once there amid the shadows, I didn't want to leave. -James Calvin Schaap, author of Romey's Place and Touches the Sky "The storm woke, massed, and then slipped over the frozen lake. Clouds, hunched and rolled like a fighter's shoulders, leaned and sparred across the star-pricked sky. At the beach they stalled, swept over low dunes. Hissing, they infiltrated the steep wooded hills guarding the shore. It spilled east, gathering speed, racing through the stubbled, sleeping cornfields with maniac delight, a thousand hollow stalks quaking like toneless wind chimes. Winter-stiff trees lined the fields, blacker-than-night sentries latticing the sky. It slammed against their skeletal frames and they rose up, groaning and twisting, frozen fibers cracking like old man bones. Their defense held no weight. The storm grabbed fistfuls of dead leaves, tossing them about like a rampaging child. Then, grasping the trees themselves, it twisted hard maple fingers in a torturer's grip. Up and down the ribbon of woods, branches popped and cracked and shrieked. Limbs gave way, the trees saved by their rending. Then it began to snow." -Excerpt from Robert Vander Lugt's story "Onslaught"

"Jeremiah Webster's brilliant Introduction leaves no doubt about Eliot's relevance for a new generation of readers." -Lee Oser, author of T.S. Eliot and American Poetry and The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett Dr Webster's introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist. -Dr. E Victor Bobb, Whitworth University . . . Eliot's poetry deserves a new readership. As the United States continues to seek departed nymphs through the incantations of technology, as moral impotence becomes the norm, the jeremiad voice of The Waste Land is a much needed corrective; its pessimism may in fact be the best prescription for our time. Eliot's critique of Victorian decay, of the bankruptcy of empire, "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal," is a necessary rejoinder for a generation still trying to maintain a Post-WWII "American Dream." As prosperity becomes increasingly mirage-like in the Twenty First Century, as decadence begets debt, as shalom is pursued through duplicitous governance and predator drones, the poem's final lamentation, "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih," is an apt benediction for our age. To survey this "heap of broken images" as Eliot so courageously does, is to recognize that all is not well, that unless there is revelation, "the sound of water over a rock," unless we are able to answer, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?," there is little reason for hope. -From the Introduction by Jeremiah Webster Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.

" 'The heart has reasons which the mind does not understand.' How often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the 'heart' over the 'head, ' a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal's terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart. For him, in theological matters, which seemed to him much larger, more difficult, and more important than scientific matters, the whole personality is involved." -From the Introduction by T.S. Eliot Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) left his Pensées incomplete at his death, but the meanings these "thoughts" contain continue to be resurrected. Herein he sets forth a defense of the Christian faith that directly incorporates skepticism and stoicism, that confronts infinity and nothingness, intuition and analysis, being and death, boredom and despair. Amidst all of these thoroughly modern problems lies Pascal's infamous wager: to have faith in God's existence or not. WISEBLOOD BOOKS is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty. We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of truth.

"Francini Bruni, friend to Joyce in Trieste, wrote that 'he only completely admires the unchangeable: the mystery of Christ and the mute drama that surrounds it.' Colum Power, in a study of remarkable patience and rigour, traces Joyce's deep engagement with the more articulate forms which that necessarily mute, often mystical drama has sometimes taken when reduced to the humiliations of language . . . "-From the Introduction by Declan Kiberd, author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's MasterpieceReviews of James Joyce's Catholic Categories:"I am delighted to learn of this work about Joyce, being one of a relatively small number of Joyce critics who see him as having a very substantial religious sensibility; a topic that I continue to find of great interest and importance."-Weldon Thornton, author of The Antimodernism of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"A very important book. I now understand Joyce better. Critiquing Joyce and Joycean critics is always perilous, affording many opportunities to tumble ignominiously from the tightrope of true balanced perspective. This book crosses that abyss with awe-inspiring aplomb! Leaves one almost breathless, the masterful handling of the material."-Joseph Pearce, author of The Quest for Shakespeare"A wonderful book, I have read it with great pleasure. The author has surely done his homework. The arguments are compelling and expressed with grace and style; an excellent contribution to Joyce studies."-Mary Lowe-Evans, author of Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company"A book of enormous significance not only for students of Joyce but for our coming to grips as a nation with Irish Catholicism, but it has enormous potential way beyond the special local Irish interest, considering the widespread influence of Joyce on world literature."-Father Vincent Twomey"A work of impressive quality, not only a matter of knowledge and extensive readings of Joyce's critics. The substance and course of the reflection is really interesting . . . So many of the observations made are absolutely remarkable."-Father Antoine Levy, O.P.A Note About the Author:Fr. Colum Power, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1965, is a religious missionary priest. He obtained a Master's degree in Anglo-Irish Studies (1st hons.) at University College Dublin in 1991, a Licentiate in the History of Theology (9) at the San Vicente de Ferrer Faculty of Theology in Valencia, Spain, in 2011, and a doctorate in the History of the Church (9.2) at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome in 2013.

Regarded by many as one of the finest Spanish poets, the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross wrote sublime poems that chronicle the soul's purificatory pilgrimage through the dark night of the soul to the joy of mystical union with the Creator. To translate such works, with their passionate, intimate intensity, requires both boldness and delicacy.The translator of poetry faces many challenges. As the late poet Timothy Murphy notes in his introduction, she must adhere "not just to beauty but to truth." In these masterful renderings, Rhina P. Espaillat proves her prowess as both poet and translator. Espaillat has lived with these poems since she was a child, having heard them recited by her father. Her deep and loving connection to the sound and substance of these works has brought forth verses-exquisite in their own right-that transmit both the truth and the beauty of St. John's original.

The title of Andrew Frisardi's The Moon on Elba comes from one of its poems, a beautiful ghazal, striking in its graceful blend of form and intelligent feeling. The book's opening poems include the Audenesque meditation "Word" and a character poem, "The Jeweler," in which marvels are found, ironically, in the mundane. Frisardi writes of bedtime when we "undress-rehearse for death." He offers a Covid poem in Sapphics and a lovely ballade for "That singing contradiction," the late Timothy Murphy.

One Mardi Gras night in 1520s Paris, college students Jean Calvin (founder of Calvinism and autocratic ruler of Geneva), Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Counter-Reformation Catholic religious order, the Jesuits), and their bawdy friend François Rabelais (the humanist novelist) find themselves mixed up in a gruesome murder-and any one of them might be guilty. The ensuing investigation sparks a battle of wits and weapons, plunging them into questions of justice and mercy, grace and sin, innocence, guilt, love, and contempt. Before the bells ring in the start of Lent, they must confront the darkest parts of their souls and find the courage to pursue truth in a world that seems intent on obscuring it. Sonnez Les Matines imagines what might have happened if these three brilliant, volatile men had to put their convictions to the test while navigating a brutal crime and their own involvement in it. When left to his own devices, each character speaks in his own verse form, giving the play the feeling of a fierce sparring match between masters. Calvin's blank verse toys with despair as he wrestles with doubts about the good-ness of God and the possibility of freedom; Ignatius commands situa-tions in clipped iambic tetrameter, revealing his background as a disci-plined soldier, while his passion for order shows through in frequent alliteration; and Rabelais dances around with iambic rhyming couplets, cracking profane, bawdy jokes that unexpectedly become profound meditations on the mysteries of God, creation, and grace.

The author of this small but superbly crafted book of lyrics, epigrams, and translations, J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985), is almost totally unknown outside a small literary coterie. His controversial contemporary Yvor Winters thought Cunningham was one of the greatest of the poets in our language, and, despite their complicated personal relationship, vigorously promoted his work. First issued in 1960, The Exclusions of a Rhyme brings together Cunningham's first four books of poetry-The Helmsman, The Judge is Fury, Doctor Drink, and Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted-published between 1942 and 1959, as well as a "prefatory" poem, "To My Wife," and a handful of translations of Latin poetry.Cunningham would always consider himself a Westerner and once opened a lecture at Amherst by referring to himself as a "renegade Irish Catholic from the plains of Montana," despite not having lived in Montana since his youth. The American West left its mark on his imagination, as can be seen in the imagery of many of his poems. As any reader will quickly observe, Cunningham's verse is formal in the extreme-there is nothing accidental, no wasted verbiage, nothing extra, no Whitmanian inclusiveness. Though his poems deal with a variety of subjects and themes both serious and unserious-"the trivial, vulgar, and exalted"-and employ many different poetic styles and meters, to a poem they exhibit a scrupulous attention to matters of form.At its best, Cunningham's "exclusions" have an emotional intensity that seems almost overwhelming at times. As in much classical poetry, the disciplined restraint of the form seems to intensify its power to convey and evoke emotion. There is something almost fierce and wild, as of a barely tamable animal, in his verse, which the form seems to be struggling to keep at bay; and the very strength needed to control the wild emotion somehow manifests its power.

These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains that, "Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty." While the poet might be prayerful and the mystic might wax poetic, there is a "fundamental difference which separates the poetic experience from the mystical experience: while the poet progresses toward the Word, the mystic tends toward Silence." As Raïssa Maritain expounds, mystics may be moved to describe their heightened experiences, but for them this "expression is not a means of completing the experience." For the furnishing of her interior castle, a mystic like St. Teresa of Avila needs no speech; her talk, the record she left us of the "prayer of quiet," is "only a result of superabundance, a generous attempt at communication."The poet, on the contrary, cannot do without words. They are the vital stuff of his service to the world. Albert Béguin corroborates Maritain's conclusion, contending that "whatever value one attributes to the poetic act, it remains an act submitted to the necessity of form. It ends at the word." On the other hand, the poetic word points beyond language, ever striving for a fuller communion with reality and its Maker.Inhabiting the tensions between sense and nonsense, poetry and mysticism, articulation and its absence, Maritain manifests the hidden mysteries at the heart of all poetry worthy of the name.

In this swift yet comprehensive survey, Trevor Cribben Merrill considers the works of Martin Mosebach, Christopher Beha, Randy Boyagoda, and many others.