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Paul Lynch's powerful fifth novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize, considered the most prestigious award for fiction in the English-speaking world. The vote was unanimous, according to Esi [...]

Absolution: A Novel, by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $28) Alice McDermott contends that women often avoid writing about women's lives because they tend to be perceived [...]

Shortly after the end of World War II, religious infighting between Hindus and Muslims broke out on the Indian subcontinent. As episodes of violence became frequent in communities that had [...]

*Miller, Jane. Paper Banners. Copper Canyon. Nov. 2023.112p. ISBN 9781556596735. pap. $17. POETRY In her seventies, Miller (Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions) writes what may be her [...]

Judges for the 2021 Booker Prize were unanimous in granting the award--the most prestigious literary honor for fiction in English--to Damon Galgut for The Promise. A bestselling South African novelist [...]

In an interview for The Booker Prizes website, Shehan Karunatilaka says he first started thinking about his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida after the end of the Sri [...]

The Village Idiot: A Novel, by Steve Stern (Melville House, 368 pp., $27.99) Considered one of the 20th century's leading Expressionist artists, Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was obsessed with drawing and [...]

Grotz, Jennifer. Still Falling: Poems. Graywolf. May 2023. 72p. ISBN 9781644452318. pap. $16. POETRY Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Grotz (Window Left Open) offers free verse with scatterings [...]

Awash in irony, Kirstin Valdez Quade's debut novel, The Five Wounds reads like a prose poem. Its descriptive details develop the characters slowly, gradually revealing the plot in which a [...]

On June 4, 1989, at approximately 1 a.m., Chinese government troops began firing on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. No one is sure of the number of demonstrators present. Nor [...]

If Elna Conroy had not been a Catholic and had not taken the Bible seriously, especially the parts about following Christ and turning the other cheek, her life and that [...]

Kathleen Duffy Teilhard's Struggle: Embracing the Work of Evolution. Orbis Books, 176 pages, $20 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a world-renowned paleontologist. He played a major role in the [...]

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, by Paul Auster (Henry Holt, 800 pp., $35) STEPHEN CRANE was 24 years old when his masterpiece, The Red Badge of [...]

Although the peoples of Africa had little direct involvement with the causes of the First World War, European colonial powers conscripted nearly two million soldiers from Africa and sent them [...]

The Friend By Sigrid Nunez Riverhead Books. 224p $25 Sigrid Nunez mines the effect of suicide on family, friends and even the pet dog in her National Book Award winner, [...]

If You Can Get It By Brendan Hodge Ignatius Press 285p $16.95 Jen and Katie Nilsson look for love and happiness--in all the wrong places. The sisters inhabit an anything-goes [...]

The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Japan's Most Beloved Modern Haiku Poet, by Sumita Oyama, translated by William Scott Wilson (Tuttle, 352 pp., $19.99) As Japan opened [...]

Heather McHugh is the only writer in America who loved the nuns--or so she thinks. Since writing her last book, Upgraded to Serious, McHugh, a former chancellor of the Academy [...]

You can say almost anything about Jesus Christ, according to Dorothy L. Sayers, but you cannot say that he is dull. Nor can you find the murder of God tedious. [...]

Poetry spills out almost everywhere in The Discomfort of Evening, the debut novel by 29-year-old Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translated by Michele Hutchison, it won the 2020 International Booker Prize. The [...]

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague, by Maggie O'Farrell (Knopf, 320 pp., $26.95) William Shakespeare was born in 1564 during one of several outbreaks of the bubonic plague that killed [...]

At a time when people thought a woman's place was in the home, Grace Holmes Carlson (1906-1992) thought her place was on a picket line protesting for the rights of [...]

Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward, in the Appalachian Mountains By Cassie Chambers Ballantine Books, 304 pp., $27.00 As a child, Cassie Chambers often visited her grandparents and [...]

On the night my mother died, El Nino drifting like a mist above Our street with fine silk light billowing Out, beckoning to the winter Darkness. One moment there was [...]

WAGING PEACE: ONE SOLDIER'S STORY OF PUTTING LOVE FIRST By Diana Oestreich published by Broadleaf Books; 240 pages; $24.99 Diana Oestreich was brought up to be patriotic and religious with [...]

Nonviolence makes sense. Or as peace activist John Dear puts it in one of his many statements quoted throughout The Two Hands of Yes and No: 'We don't kill people [...]

In a sense, this book began as a moment of inspiration when, during prayer, Pope Francis felt that God wanted him to say that 'there should be an alliance between [...]

INVISIBLE AMERICANS: THE TSASK COST Of CHILD POVERTY By Jeff Madrick Published by Knopf, 240 pages, $25 In 1962, Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker, published The Other [...]

This poem is frantic. It's about your Mother. It's about looking for your Mother. This poem--its subject, the Interior of your mother's eye, its subject, Blindness, its subject, pain--should move [...]

Warlight A novel By Michael Ondaatje Knopf. 287p $26.95 Set in the waning days of World War II, Michael Ondaatje's seventh novel, Warlight, concerns two British children whose parents abandon [...]

SECRETS WE KEPT: THREE WOMEN OF TRINIDAD By Krystal Sital Published by W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $25.95 "Trinis" do not tell people that the island's name is an historical hoax, [...]

Jesuit Fr. Gregory Boyle spreads the Gospel notion of Jesus Christ's radical kinship with humanity and says we should do likewise. That's the message of his eye-opening new book, Barking [...]

FORTY AUTUMNS: A FAMILY STORY OF COURAGE AND SURVIVAL ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BERLIN WALL By Nina Willner Published by William Morrow Paperbacks, 416 pages, $15.99 AMONG THE LIVING [...]

READING GOD'S HANDWRITING Poems Philip C. Kolin Kaufmann. 122p $16.95 EPITAPHS FOR THE JOURNEY New, Selected, and Revised Poems Paul Mariani, Barry Mosey Illustrator Cascade Books. 234p $26 Philip C. [...]

WOMEN ROWING NORTH-NAVIGATING LIFE'S CURRENTS AND FLOURISHING AS WE AGE By Mary Pipher Published by Bloomsbury, 262 pages, $27 "There's young old age" when older people can mostly do what [...]

During Lent, Trappist Fr. Thomas Merton was irate when the Passion was read in what he described as an "extremely trite and pedestrian English version," albeit one approved by the [...]

Alan Lightman, professor and author of more than 15 books, including the best-selling novel Einstein's Dreams, says he is not a believer in God. But he wishes he were. If [...]

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH By Richard Flanagan Knopf. 352p $26.95 The Pacific theater of World War II is often thought of as a forgotten war. But anyone [...]

Byline: Diane Scharper Did the United States really need a French statue, especially one of colossal proportions? The visionary French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi thought that it did. And if [...]

THE CIVIL WARS OF JULIA WARD HOWE By Elaine Showalter Published by Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $17 Most people know Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) as the author of "The [...]

Most people know the life story of Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), mystic, miracle worker, founder of the Franciscan Order, and Roman Catholic saint. At least, they think they know his [...]

THE HIGH PLACES Stories By Fiona McFarlane Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 280p $26 Fiona McFarlane's Anglican upbringing adds resonance to her latest book, The High Places, making what could be [...]

Byline: Diane Scharper In October 1940, the Germans, with help from the Poles, crammed 400,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto. They sealed off the ghetto from the rest of the [...]

DEATH OF THE BLACK-HAIRED GIRL By Robert Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 288p $25 A lapsed Catholic, Robert Stone considers his loss of religion one of the pivotal events of his [...]