The good life in The Good Life is brittle fragile ironic impermanent And it is often Catholic In these 11 short stories Erin McGraw author of three books and professor of creative writing at Ohio State University watches hears and records contemporary America in 15-page snatches She drops i

ldquo Albion rdquo is a magic a mythic word It is the primal name of England itself and also of its whole island It is the Celtic Albio and the Gaelic Alba Its root-syllable alb ldquo white rdquo catches the whiteness of Dover rsquo s cliffs and suggests a pristine purity or blankness It

Ron Hansen’s new novel is a dollop of sweet cream, an entertainment, a sip of champagne, a screwball comedy, a romp, a bauble, a love letter to Nebraska.

The title is brave God and the Imagination The book is even braver for in 22 essays the prizewinning biographer and poet Paul Mariani probes himself modern American poetry and the poetic imagination His goal is to link together the making of a poem the worldview of a poet and the shining of Go

Last spring I ran a seminar on the contemporary Catholic imagination in America and at the end I asked my students to write about their own religious imaginations One found a surprise she discovered she had a religious imagination But she shouldn rsquo t have been surprised everyone has onea se

Brave novelist Ron Hansen In Mariette in Ecstasy 1991 he entered the mind of a contemplative nun with bleeding stigmata In Atticus 1996 he looked into the paternal love of a 67-year-old Colorado cattleman pursuing his estranged son in Mexico Now in Hitler rsquo s Niece he takes on the young