Slant News

Dear Friends:

Suzanne and I are donating to Slant Books several copies of a rare, out-of-print, hardcover edition of God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Advent and Christmas.

In a small North Carolina riverside town where past and present are mysteriously entangled, young Daniel Waterson is growing up in the towering presence of his father Ray, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose mystical powers extend far beyond those of a trained soldier.

Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop—“The bight is littered with old correspondences”—Scott Cairns avers: “So, also, is my mind.”

On the first day of spring in the Inland Empire of Southern California, our narrator Joe inadvertently rams his car into Ronnie, a homeless man riding a bicycle. The bike is crushed, aluminum cans are scattered, but a new relationship is formed.

Gather the Olives is a dangerous book. That’s because it is about peace in a time when peace in the Holy Land is a faraway, even radical notion. It is about hope and food and community and the way there can be solidarity in sharing a meal

Matters for You Alone is a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames—and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events—the domestic, the mundane—in light of the eternal.

In the opening poem of Matthew Porto’s dazzling debut collection, we hear the voice of the recurring angel figure for the first time, commanding us to “Get used to the light.” That light—blinding, mysterious, unsettling, but occasionally illuminating—shows up again and again in Porto’s taut, elegant poems.

The people in There Will Never Be Another Night Like This have one thing in common: they’re in flux. Will they pivot and move on gracefully, or stumble and fall?

There is an ancient Christian saying from the Patristic Era which is known in its most concise form as lex orandi, lex credendi. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church translates it: “The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.”

An old man—poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar—sifts through the broken fragments of his memory as he recounts what it was like to grow up in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II.

This is a book about a girl who left home without quite meaning to. One evening, doing her algebra homework, the sixteen-year-old abruptly realizes the tight-knit fundamentalist community she has been raised in may not have all the answers it claims to have.

Searching for Home, Robert Pack’s splendid twenty-second collection of poems, written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search for meaning.

“Olga Sedakova is a writer of global significance. . .the publishing of this collection is a welcome stage in the reception of her exceptional genius in the West.” So writes Rowan Williams in his foreword to this translation of Old Songs.

Shortly after learning they would become the parents of twins, the physician-writer Amit Majmudar and his wife received a devastating in utero diagnosis: one of the twins had a potentially fatal congenital heart defect.

With the rise of anti-Semitism, extremism, political polarization, mass shootings, the fraying of Black-Jewish-Asian alliances, and the loss of personal connections during the age of Covid, where is God, and how can we find the joy and wonder in our lives? How do we come to terms with loss? How can art and language help us to cope with life and honor the dead?

In this fourth and final entry in the Jon Mote Mysteries, our accidental sleuth and his sister Judy find themselves entangled in an international web of evil done and evil revenged.

Please contribute to Slant’s end of year fundraising campaign and support truly independent publishing. Read our annual appeal letter, “Beyond the Samestream,” or go straight to our donation page.

In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece: The Fate of the Animals. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to pre-figure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc’s own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later.

Register now for the online book launch of Nance Van Winckel’s Sister Zero. Nance will read from the book, engage in a discussion of the book with special guest writer Kate Lebo, author of The Book of Difficult Fruit, as well as Slant editor Gregory Wolfe, and answer your questions.