Archive for March, 2009


On Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor

At NPR today I discuss Brad Gooch’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor, a good book that, increasingly, I sort of wish I hadn’t read. An excerpt: Reading about a favorite writer is risky. No matter how diligently the reader tries to compartmentalize, disappointing revelations threaten to infect the very books that inspired curiosity about the author in the first place. . . .

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2009 ToB champ emerges

The 2009 Tournament of Books ends with a match between Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge.

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Morgan’s All the Living: Not hope, but resignation

Today at The Second Pass I consider C.E. Morgan’s first novel, All the Living, in the context of other fiction that takes up the question of faith — and as an example of what Marilynne Robinson has provisionally called “cosmic realism.” An excerpt: Marilynne Robinson is the rare contemporary writer who has dared to devote entire novels largely to the . . .

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