Everyone’s talking about Thomas Merton again—Merton, the peripatetic would-be poet who decided to reject the noise of mid-century America to become a Trappist monk. In 1948, seven years into his stay at Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton published his autobiography, a “spiritual rejection of the world.” The Seven…

“How would you feel if in your entire lifetime it had never mattered what you thought?” For the man being asked in Miriam Toews’ new novel, Women Talking, the question is hypothetical. For the woman asking, it’s anything but. She lives in Molotschna, a Mennonite colony in South America, where she and the community’s…

First published in 1982 and re-released in late 2017, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban concerns a lonely woman named Dorothy and her brief affair with a kind, gentle frogman, escaped from a local laboratory. Ingalls relates both joy and pain quickly, her prose swift and unsentimental, even when detailing the tragic. Mrs.…

On New Year’s Eve, we received a tarot reading, and we were told the coming year would bring a great abundance. An abundance of what? Judging from our ever-growing to-read pile, we can only assume the cards meant “books,” because there are quite a few coming our way in 2019. On the fiction front, we’re looking forward…

The best meal I ever made was a New Year’s Eve dinner a few years back. Nothing about it was particularly unusual—bacon, a big piece of meat, dark chocolate. I’m not in the habit of preparing heavy, decadent meals, and neither are my friends who’d be eating with me, instead favoring somewhat healthier fare that…