Sharing the Wiseblood newsletter

Forthcoming from Wiseblood Books Dear Readers, Our horizon of forthcoming publications is afire with good things — so many, in fact, that I can't help sharing a few highlights: 1. Seren of the Wildwood, a long fantasy story in verse by Marly Youmans, with cover and interior illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Youmans is an award-winning author of over fifteen books, including, most recently, Charis in the World of Wonders.    2. Works of Mercy, a novel by Sally Thomas, who was our 2021 Wiseblood Writer-in-Residence. Thomas is author of the poetry book Motherland (Able Muse Press 2020), a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. With Micah Mattix, she is co-editor of a poetry anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, from Paraclete Press. Currently she serves as Associate Poetry Editor of the New York Sun. 3. A Theology of Fiction (expanded) by Cassandra Nelson. A shorter version of Nelson's "A Theology of Fiction" appeared in First Things in April of 2022. The essay asks "Where did Catholic literary fiction come from in the first place?" and answers this question by examining the life and work of a remarkable but little-known American Benedictine named Sister Mariella Gable. The literary reputations of J.F. Powers and Flannery O’Connor rose, in part, on Gable's reviews, anthologies, and single-handed reconsiderations of what Catholic literature could be. Nelson, an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, brings years of hard-won ruminations to bear on questions concerning faith and fiction. 4. Paul Claudel's play The City, preface by Pater Edmund Waldstein, a monk of Stift Heiligenkreuz, a Cistercian abbey in Austria and editor of the Josias, a manual of Catholic political philosophy.   5. Seneca's The Madness of Hercules, translated by Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and poet laureate of California, student of the great Harvard classicist Robert Fitzgerald. Our Wiseblood edition will include Gioia's essay on the nature and art of tragedy.   6.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal's novella The Woman without a Shadow, translated by Vincent Kling, whose translation of Heimito von Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps (NYRB 2021) recently received the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. 7. Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize Finalist and Penelope Niven Award Winner Spence K. M. Brown’s second novel Hold Fast. The book tells the story of a near-Olympian rower and his father living on the shore of Lake Superior as they struggle to find their way through his wife’s death. We hope you'll clear a few inches of your shelf in anticipation of this wonderful admixture of old and new books, translations and originals, fiction and verse, veteran writers and young authors. Thank you for reading,   Joshua Hren Founder & Editor, Wiseblood Books

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