Religion
The novelist on her loss of faith, youth culture, cult leaders, and spending time with syllables.
When I was thirteen, two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the house to follow up on a conversation from the week before with my mother.
Picture an area the size of Manhattan covered in sand. It rises and falls and disappears.
“Literature is a way of establishing the humanness of others. It’s interested in the relationships between people, between authenticity and truth. That in itself has to make us better disposed to each other.”
Freeing Joan of Arc from her Catholic trappings in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
If novelists could tell the story of climate change, they might spark the action scientists are calling for in order to save the planet.
“I don’t accept the idea of my history as tragic.”
“Hippias Minor is such a handy introduction to Socrates as a personality, to this method of argumentation, to the culture of Athens where you have all these hot-shot foreign speakers like Hippias coming in and making the intellectual fermentation even stronger.”
On Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
“Post-love, post-work, post-faith, post-home. What’s left?”
Margaret Morton reports that on her first long drive through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan she was delighted when a skyline of minarets and domes appeared out of the silvery-blue, thin, stone-dry air, like a mirage.
Compassion, religion, and secrets in a North Dakota boom town.
Pillars
Somewhere on the crossroads of history they stood: the pillar of Salt and the pillar of Fire.
Frederik: A story in film, sculpture, and works on paper.
My loves and my fucks rode in separate cars. At the crossing they went opposite ways, the loves to the east and the fucks to the west. I stayed and had a coffee.
Performance artist Neal Medlyn discusses the celebrity public persona, growing up Pentacostal, and his new performance King, running through October 26 at The Kitchen.
Katherine Cooper speaks to playwright Adriano Shaplin about baffled audiences, favoring amateurism over professionalism, and what The Crucible got wrong.
Polish artist Karczmarczyk on desire in a post-Communist country, why the Catholic church needs modern art and being mistaken for Lady Gaga.
