Givenness Of Things

Literature & Fiction

Marilynne Robinson

Essays & Correspondence

Virago

What are We Doing Here?

New essays by the Orange and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead , Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson, one of today's most important thinkers - admired by President Obama, and so many others - impels us to action and offers us hope. Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home , winner of the Orange Prize; and Gilead , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call to continue the tradition of the great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theatre of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still." In our era of rampant political and cultural pessimism, we run the risk of becoming bogged down in disillusionment and of losing sight of ways out of the mire. In What Are We Doing Here? , the incomparable Marilynne Robinson offers us balm: impelling us to action, but offering us hope.

What Are We Doing Here

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Virago Press Ltd.

Gilead

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel 
A New York Times Top-Ten Book of 2004 
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction\nNearly 25 years after Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Gilead tells the story of America and will break your heart.

Reading Genesis

Little, Brown Book Group Limited

Jack A Novel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club) A Novel

Jack

Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction\nJack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the beloved, erratic, and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African American high school teacher who is also the daughter of a preacher--discerning, generous, and independent. Their fraught, beautiful romance is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.\nThe Gilead novels are about the dilemmas and promise of American history--about the ongoing legacy of the Civil War and the enduring impact of both racial inequality and deep-rooted religious belief. They touch the deepest chords in our national character and resonate with our deepest feelings.

Mother Country

In this powerful, eloquent, and elucidating essay, Marilynne Robinson has pinpointed exactly the motives and the mythology and the reality behind the destruction of our planet. The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Great Britain is a perfect metaphor for twentieth-century genocide. Not the small, insane eruptions of eradication that took place in Hitler's Germany, but rather that routine, day-to-day, thoroughly "democratic" envenomation of the planet by a current industrial magic (encouraged, or at least condoned, by almost everybody), which threatens to terminate everything on earth in the quite foreseeable future. 
Robinson's book is as powerful a contribution to the literature of revelation and protest as was that seminal photographic essay by W. Eugene and Aileen Smith on Minamata's disease fifteen years ago. It is as bloodcurdling as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as thought-provoking and prophetic as the best works of people like Barry Commoner and Loren Eiseley. 
This is a work of great intelligence and fine investigative reporting. It is also a lucid interpretation of history, and very important in its discussions of the roots of current dilemmas. And lastly, Mother Country is courageous, and marvelous literature at its best.

Faber Faber Inc

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Books by Marilynne Robinson