First, John and I have blogs up on GodSpy, follow-ups to the pope’s visit to the United States: Mine is After the Pope: Time to Hit the Books? John’s is on the front page as I write this: Gazing Upwards: The Pope’s Homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
And thanks to Kathleen Lundquist for the heads-up on [...]

Tags: Catholic fiction, Debra Murphy, Godspy, John Murphy

A discussion of the book/film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is going on over on the Yahoo discussion group, Literate Catholics Unite, and I thought it would do a bit of double duty for me to post here what I just posted there about this book/movie, both of which I regard as [...]

Tags: authors, books, Catholic fiction, Cormac McCarthy, movies, novels, theodicy

I’ve just posted a review of 2007’s biggest book phenomenon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, over at Catholicfiction.net. It’s a thorough (read: lengthy) account of my mixed reaction to the final volume of the epic fantasy series. If you want the short version, it’s this: Rowling’s handling of the Snape subplot sucked.

Tags: book reviews, Catholic fiction, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, novels, Snape

The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy [...]

Tags: book reviews, Catholic fiction, Joseph Conrad, novels

The Liguorian online has published an article by Brian Doyle called “Voices of Vision and Power: The Best U.S. Catholic Writers.” In it, Doyle briefly discusses the “Greats” of American Catholic literature that every Catholic writer should read, study and love.
At the top of the list, unsuprisingly, is the inimitable Bl. Flannery. Here’s a little [...]

Tags: authors, books, Brian Doyle, Catholic fiction, Flannery O'Connor, writers