The Little World of the Past (Wiseblood Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Fogazzaro, Antonio

Classics

Wiseblood Books

DEAD SOULS follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-class gentleman who arrives unknown in a provincial town and immediately strives to make himself a respectable name by impressing the local officials. Though of limited means, he spends copiously, convinced that an initial display of wealth and power will help him to acquire the connections he needs to live a sumtuous life. Part of his plan to gain stability and status revolves around his absurd and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls," to purchase dead serfs from landowners in order to trick the tax-collectors in a game of get rich quick. TRANSLATOR: D.J. Hoggarth Vladimir Nabokov contended that Gogol's DEAD SOULS is predominantly concerned with "poshlust," which, translated imperfectly, means, "cheap, sham, common. . . high flautin, in bad taste." Chichikov is almost an archetype of "poshlust." Described as a golden mean, "a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young," Chichikov incarnates the peak of false-respectability, pretension, and self-interest. As "Russian" as both the protagonist and the very word and concept of "poshlust" are, and even as the narrative unfolds in a provincial Russian town (so provincial it is known only as N--), Gogol's vision is "catholic" in the literal sense: its revelatory power is universal, soliciting laughter and gasps through his hilariously terrifying portraits. Of Chichikov Professor William Phelps writes that "no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue." Still further, Chichikov is not simply a caricature of someone other than ourselves. In the interpretive essay included in this WISEBLOOD CLASSICS edition, William Weathers insists that "Gogol knew that Everyman by becoming a dead soul can find himself in a virtual hell on earth, a village of N--, regardless of place or century. Dead Souls, then, is a great moral statement on your journey and mine through reality, or at least on our condition within reality." Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.

Dead Souls (Wiseblood Classic)

GÓGOL, NIKOLÄI

"'The fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses,' Dostoevsky writes at one point in DEMONS. The fact remains that for the great Russian novelist art was a theurgical function interdependent with the state of the soul." -George Panichas, THE BURDEN OF VISION
Translated by Constance Garnett
DEMONS [THE POSSESSED] follows a small circle of revolutionaries who, dissatisfied with the present state of provincial Russia and the wider world, place their faith in radical political theologies with hopes that the structures of society and being can be changed. Dostoevsky's theological anxieties become strikingly manifest in DEMONS, and the novel gains profundity because Dostoevsky does not combat nihilism by fleeing from it, but by giving it full narrative expression. The novel does not read like a morality tale, even if it portrays the "consequences" or logical practical counterparts of nihilistic philosophies. This moving story of inter-generational tensions, of revolutionaries and criminals, of strong men and underground men, of unbound love and exploited lovers, told by a master psychologist, still has staying power today.
 Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.

Demons: (The Possessed) (Wiseblood Classics)

DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR

Fr, Richard J. Hart brings years of preaching experience to the question of the cost of discipleship. The price tag in following Jesus is high-a life of self-giving. The reader (and pray-er) of this text will be challenged to look at life through Gospel eyes. This book is a call to conversion. -Robert F. Morneau, Auxiliary Bishop of Green Bay With a wide range of sources, Richard Hart has provided a handbook on the way of being a disciple in our world. Fidelity to this discipleship involves rewards and challenges. It will be a reward to read it-Michael Crosby Just as Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against "cheap grace," the belief that one gains forgiveness without contrition, communion without confession, grace without discipleship, Hart beckons us away from the materialist, secularist temptation to avoid, at all costs, the sacrifices that are indivisible from our relationship with Christ. -Joshua Hren Richard J. Hart regularly leads parish renewals and retreats. He is the author of several spiritual books.

The Price of Being a Christian

Religion & Spirituality

Hart, Richard J.

Christian Books & Bibles

A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a collection of short stories by award-winning author Amy Krohn. Set almost exclusively in the rural heart of the Midwest, A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is populated by a cast of quiet characters whose land and interior lives are brought into full relief. Like Tolstoi and Cather, Krohn draws us into unassuming, ordinary dramas in order to reveal that, in spite of our best efforts to live compartmentalized, comfortable lives loosened from the transcendent, everything is at stake. The heart of the collection is "A Portrait of Happiness and Love," a hundred page novella modeled after Tolstoi's short novel Family Happiness. In each story idealized marriages are tested, drained of false romanticism and yet, as Krohn's narrator notes, "What love we shared had suffered blows, and yet, bent and wounded, it grew upward, fiercer than before." ___________________________________ Amy Krohn lives on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin.____________________________________Advanced Praise for A Flower in the Heart of the Painting:Amy Krohn's A Flower in the Heart of the Painting is a strongly cohesive, quietly intense collection of stories, graceful in every sense of the word. Her characters face a variety of situations, wrestling with some of the most challenging mysteries of romance and fulfilled love, family and faith, childhood and maturity. Yet uniting the stories is a firm focus on art--not as mere escape or ornament but as a life-changing, spirit-filled, identifying endeavor. Krohn writes beautifully, with delicately evocative language throughout, not to mention penetrating observation and psychological depth. A very fine debut. -Professor David Graham, author of After Confession, Stutter Monk, and Greatest Hits.Amy Krohn's stories are carefully drawn portraits-life studies if you will-of ordinary men and women who inhabit the rural landscapes of Wisconsin. These are inward-turning stories, "Where the Meanings, are-" as Emily Dickinson says. Krohn renders her subjects and themes with delicate brush strokes, with the control and precision of a water colorist. These stories are acts of faith and hope. As one of her narrators says, "Isn't art the act of creation, after all? As God speaks the world into existence, so the artist extracts her own world from an empty place." She easily could be speaking of Amy Krohn's fiction.-Thom Tammaro, editor, Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest and Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest.On November 1, 2013, A Flower in the Heart of the Painting will be available for purchase via Amazon or www.wisebloodbooks.com.

A Flower in the Heart of the Painting

Krohn, Amy

Contemporary

In the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, The Unfinished Life of N. scrutinizes the quiet ambitions of normal people, their everyday fictions concerning others' and their own humanity and goodness, as it follows Nafula, the innocent but not naïve protagonist, from the backwoods of Wisconsin to AIDS-stricken regions of Africa, and, at last, through a rehabilitation program at a Mental Health home. Nafula is the granddaughter of a local-celebrity preacher whose church-without-a-church religion plays a large part in propelling her into a "missionary" existence. As does that same grandfather's sexual abuse. Soon her work in Africa confounds her self-identification as a “helper.” In the novel's final turn, Nafula must reckon with the terrible speed of mercy. _______________________________________ “Nomenclature. The wrestle of body and word. The way words had regained their verve since Africa, since long days and even months with barely a sentence written or read. How the information orgy of her homeland seemed not at all now to inflate the value of a word, but only to provide evidence of misspending, an utter lack of economy. Yes, an orgy. So that one could be every day fatigued over relations with a million sentences, a million sensual and uncontrolled substances.” -The Unfinished Life of N. ____________________________________ Short Review of The Unfinished Life of N. “How many worlds are there?” asks Nafula, the protagonist of Micah Cawber’s fine new novel, The Unfinished Life of N. "Three", responds her mother, adamant about the much belabored division between First and Third Worlds. Nafula, "she who comes with the rain," is a woman whose life has been wrenched from the machinery through which all our lives must turn. After traveling from Wisconsin to Africa and back, Nafula is able to see what we, who are so deeply invested in that machinery, are unable to see: the world of “the information orgy” that is contemporary living. The Unfinished Life of N. is the kind of fiction described by Chesterton as a necessity--necessary because it reveals what is beautiful and true in the world. Nafula continues her line of questioning: "Where does one world end and the other begin?" While it is easy to respond in the geopolitical terms by which the question is framed, the possibility for a much greater awareness is at stake. There are, for example, public worlds and private worlds, but they are all part of the one world we all share, through which all our other worlds are made. Cawber, through Nafula, is able to help us see these worlds anew; read this book, and understand again "the wrestle of body and word" by which real meaning might be made of our lives. -Brian Jobe, author of Bird's Nest in Your Hair _____________________________________ You can purchase The Unfinished Life of N. at www.wisebloodbooks.com FOR ONLY $10.00. Picture Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope.

The Unfinished Life of N.

Cawber, Micah

***OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE: FEBRUARY 21, 2014***
The Oracles Fell Silent by Lee Oser: When the legendary Sir Ted Pop hires young Richard Bellman as his secretary, Bellman’s work on the great man’s memoir transforms his young life into a divine comedy—or is it a devilish farce? In a New York beach house in Southampton, Bellman treads the forbidden ground of Ted’s final hour with Johnny Donovan, his partner in fame, who “fell” from a London rooftop in 1969. Sir Ted battles false prophets and mad messiahs for control over his own story, but what rock’s biggest mystery reveals to Bellman is the unthinkable hand of God.
 “You think Johnny understood his fate when he fell? You think you understand your fate, or I understand mine? Your story will be written, all right, but not by you. It will be written by someone you could never buy, and you wouldn’t like the narrative. Not that it matters, but you would scarcely recognize yourself, not since you lost your soul on its great crusade to nowhere.”
Wiseblood Books fosters works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope.

The Oracles Fell Silent

Oser, Lee

*** OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE: DECEMBER 15, 2013 
 As the Russian great Anton Chekov infamously noted, when a loaded rifle appears on page one, it absolutely must go off. In A Waste of Shame Geoffrey Smagacz does not ignore this dramatic principle. Before the last page is turned, someone sadly pulls the trigger. 
 Smagacz debuts a short novel and an accompanying collection of short stories written in a vein that carries the blood of Hemingway, Wodehouse, West, and Sherwood Anderson. Enter a small town where tragedy collides with fish fry cooks, soap-opera addicts, and the convenient but strained friendships of youth. Minimalist through and through, this is literary fiction that scrupulously avoids being literary. 
 He puts the bullet through my head, says something like, "Brought him down with one shot," watches my body spasm for a few moments as blood pours out of my skull, and then says to Don, "You say anything and I'll blow your head off, too," or something like that. At least that's what I thought he might do after I said I was going back to the farmhouse. Why the heck did I go into the woods with them in the first place? -A Waste of Shame

A Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales of the Appalachian Foothills

Smagacz, Geoffrey

***OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE: JANUARY 1, 2014***
 Sand, Smoke, Current is a collection of short stories written by award-winning author Robert Vander Lugt, whose work is steeped in down-to-earth profundity, are driven by conflicts that beg characters to strip away pretense in favor of a freedom obtained by unflinching acceptance of weakness and grace. Vander Lugt's prose is melancholic without being depressing, humorous without getting tangled in sarcastic irony, and his pen probes the bigger questions at every turn.
 "Like letters of encouragement penned by a divine hand, the best of these stories read like parables of a parallel universe . . . Wise, unearthly, and other-worldly stories by an author with feet planted squarely on the ground and an eye cocked toward heaven." — Mark Richard, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World and a bestselling novel Fishboy.
 Robert Vander Lugt’s characters share a certain uncertainty in a fashion that not only makes them shadowy, somehow less (or more) than real, but also lends the stories a fable-like feel, both compelling and mysterious. Don’t get me wrong. Time and place is very real in these stories—we’re with him on the lake front, often in the company of boys becoming men. But the outlines are indistinct enough for all of us to find a place beside them on the beach, in the home, with the family. Vander Lugt’s people are never anti-heroes, unusual in this era; but neither are they fanciful. It wasn’t hard to find myself in this compelling collection of tales. Once there amid the shadows, I didn’t want to leave. —James Calvin Schaap, author of Romey's Place and Touches the Sky 
“The storm woke, massed, and then slipped over the frozen lake. Clouds, hunched and rolled like a fighter’s shoulders, leaned and sparred across the star-pricked sky. At the beach they stalled, swept over low dunes. Hissing, they infiltrated the steep wooded hills guarding the shore. It spilled east, gathering speed, racing through the stubbled, sleeping cornfields with maniac delight, a thousand hollow stalks quaking like toneless wind chimes. Winter-stiff trees lined the fields, blacker-than-night sentries latticing the sky. It slammed against their skeletal frames and they rose up, groaning and twisting, frozen fibers cracking like old man bones. Their defense held no weight. The storm grabbed fistfuls of dead leaves, tossing them about like a rampaging child. Then, grasping the trees themselves, it twisted hard maple fingers in a torturer’s grip. Up and down the ribbon of woods, branches popped and cracked and shrieked. Limbs gave way, the trees saved by their rending. Then it began to snow.” -Excerpt from Robert Vander Lugt's story “Onslaught”

Sand, Smoke, Current

Vander Lugt, Robert

Paradise in The Waste Land is a collection of T.S. Eliot's early poems and essays. This volume includes an introduction by Jeremiah Webster. "Jeremiah Webster's brilliant Introduction leaves no doubt about Eliot's relevance for a new generation of readers." -Lee Oser, author of T.S. Eliot and American Poetry and The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett "Dr Webster's introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist."-Dr. E Victor Bobb, Whitworth University Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty.

Paradise in The Waste Land (Wiseblood Classics)

T.S.Eliot

History & Criticism

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