language
For Every Life Saved
The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die.
DIFTS: Do It For The Story
So I was over at a friend’s last night for dinner, and she let me in on something kind of awesome that’s swirling among the existentially-hungry, generally-affluent Catholic school boys she teaches. Wow. (If any of them reads this I guess I’m going to sound majorly out of touch for even mentioning it, but that’s…
The Lingering Loveliness of Long Things
When was the last time someone read you a (really long) story?
Awesome and Full of Dread
Fall is past its peak in my neighborhood. The legacy fall is leaving behind: literally, leaves. Heaps and piles of leaves. Leaf towers so high you could hide a small marching band inside them. The biggest leaf pile of all currently rests across the street from my house. It was cleverly and carefully built around…
Lips Moved by an Angel’s Hands
Correction: This post is premised on an incorrect interpretation of the work in question. Refer to Lisa Levy‘s comment below and my response to it. Finally, on my third attempt—not counting two extra false starts—I made it by bicycle, with six friends, to see the Chagall and Matisse stained glass windows at the Rockefellers’ Union…
A Little Somethin’ Somethin’
Sex. Drugs. (God. Death.) There’s something about the saying of “something” that goes beyond mere euphemism. Today, KtB editor Alex Rose, after diligent research, gets into the nitty gritty of the “something” exchanged between the sheets and into the bloodstreams of broken bodies in “Safe to Say” on Obit, the online magazine on life, death…
The Pleasure of the Text
Jean-Luc Marion, at the outset of God without Being: One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure. During the year of my becoming a Catholic, that frought and crazy and inevitable year, I bought a New Oxford Annotated Bible from my college bookstore. Its over two thousand pages flop between…
Must One Describe?
The air here is always dry. Thin, but also thick. A white pipe the width of a soda can reaches from floor to ceiling, making the never-ending music of a rainstick. From it comes enough heat that even on the coldest days of winter I’ve had to keep the window open at least a crack…
Translator’s Note
A lapsed Catholic discovers the magnificent God of his disbelief in a Yiddish library. An excerpt from KtB founder Peter Manseau’s new novel.
