People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

The Shoemaker’s Gospel by Daniel Brent is the first original work of fiction for Loyola Press. The marketing for the book is also unique. No advertising is planned. Neither will the company mail copies en masse to reviewers and journalists. Instead, the publisher is mailing 3500 complimentary copies of the book to pastors, deacons, and directors of religious education. Loyola thinks that the novel has the makings of a popular hit, and the idea is to get the book into the hands of grassroots gatekeepers who will talk it up.

The novel is a charming, fable-esque depiction of the ministry of Jesus as seen through the eyes of a sympathetic bystander, a shoemaker in Capernaum. The author, Daniel Brent, got the idea for the story from his daughter, who asked him to name the historical figure he would most like to meet. For Brent, that person was Jesus. He began to write, using the techniques of imaginative contemplation on the the gospel stories developed by St. Ignatius Loyola.

The novel is being published simultaneously in Spanish — another first for Loyola Press.

For a stimulating look at the “big picture” of Christianity, read this essay in the current Books and Culture by Philip Jenkins, the Penn State historian. You might want to just scroll down to the second half of the article, where Jenkins summarizes what he’s learned from new books on the history of Christianity. Some lessons: Christian renewal movements always transcend political and cultural borders as well as denominations, women have occupied a key role in the churches in all periods of Christian history, and mission and evangelism have been central activities of the churches in most historical periods.

Jenkins suggests that the current eclipse of Christianity in Western Europe might be a temporary phenomenon. One of the lessons history teaches is this:

The best indicator that Christianity is about to experience a vast expansion is a widespread conviction that the religion is doomed or in its closing days. Arguably the worst single moment in the history of West European Christianity occurred around 1798, with the Catholic Church under severe persecution in much of Europe and skeptical, deist, and Unitarian movements in the ascendant across the Atlantic world. That particular trough also turned into an excellent foundation, from which various groups built the great missionary movement of the 19th century, the second evangelical revival, and the Catholic devotional revolution. Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands, and that they urgently need to make up these losses further afield, whether outward (overseas) or downward (among the previously neglected lost sheep at home). Quite possibly, the current sense of doom surrounding European Christianity will drive a comparable movement in the near future. Resurrection is not just a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, it is a historical model that explains the religion’s structure and development.

It’s hardly news that the saints were real human beings with very human flaws. That’s the point about saints; they’re people like us who’ve achieved great holiness. But no one has taken this notion farther than Thomas Craughwell does in his entertaining new book Saints Behaving Badly. Craughwell writes about the sordid background of some of the men and women whom we now esteem for their virtue and religious fervor. There’s St. Callixtus, a brawler and embezzler who became pope; St. Mary of Egypt, who was a famed seductress before her conversion; St. Camillus de Lellius, who was a professional con man before becoming a benefactor of the poor in Rome. Craughwell writes about 28 of these colorful saints of the church. He tells their stories without moralizing commentary. The lesson is clear: no one is beyond salvation. Anyone can become a saint.

A new book called The Theocons: Secular America Under Seige, is the topic of a noteworthy essay-book review by Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal magazine. The book is an attack on Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and the writers and intellectuals associated with him at the journal First Things. The book argues that these “theocons” threaten secular America when they insist that public policy, politics, and law should reflect Americans’ deeply-held moral values. The liberal Baumann defends the conservative Neuhaus: “the arguments Neuhaus and company make about the religious origins of our ideas about human dignity and the intrinsic value of each life are hardly a recipe for theocratic tyranny.”

The Times Book Review looks at the “Dummies” books. Publisher John Wiley cranks out 200 Dummies titles a year; “at that rate, there may soon be more Dummies books out there than dummies to read them,” quips the Times. If you suspected that these books were written to a formula, you’d be correct.

The editorial team, based in Indianapolis, gives authors a kind of “Dummies for Dummies” manual and a computer template. “Copy editors do the line editing and Dummifying,” Steele said. “It’s a word we use to talk about how to make text comply with our style guide.” The approach is strict. “We address the reader as you — you can, next you do this — we don’t talk about we,” she said. “We try to be funny, or at least lighthearted.” Furthermore, Steele said: “We don’t use future tense, we don’t use passive voice, we don’t have long chapters. A 26-page chapter is getting pretty long.”

The Catholic Channel on Sirius Satellite Radio debuts tomorrow with a programming line-up featuring veteran Catholic radio personalities and, on Saturdays, Notre Dame football. Hosts include Father Paul Keenan, Lino Rulli, Dave and Sue Koening, and Gus Lloyd. The channel will broadcast daily Mass from St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 8 a.m. Go here for more information.

The Tigers trounced Kansas City this afternoon and clinched a playoff spot. Motown rejoices and the champagne flows. But consider the spiritual side of this sports drama. This is the same team that lost 119 games three years ago, the second most in baseball history. Not only is the team the same. Many of the players are the same. Ten Tigers on the roster this afternoon played on that dreadful 2003 team. Three years ago they were terrible. This year they’ve been superb. This shows not just the possibility of redemption but the reality of it. Cubs fans take heed.

Then there’s the Tigers fans’ season-long experience of modest expectations being abundantly rewarded. It’s like the refrain in the Passover Seder praising God’s generosity. A modest improvement over last year’s 71-91 record would have been enough for us. Then a winning record would have been enough for us. A competitive team would have been enough for us. But now we have a playoff team. Possibly a division champion. American League champion? World Series champion? We shall see, and we will hope, but if this afternoon’s glory is all the baseball gods will give us, it will have been enough for us.

Still – can we dream for more? Sure we can. I like the Tigers’ chances. The other night I read the chapter about the playoffs in the brilliant book Baseball Between the Numbers by the stat heads at Baseball Prospectus. They looked at hundreds of factors, and isolated three that are strongly correlated with postseason success: a dominating closer, starting pitchers that get a lot of strikeouts, and good defense. The Tigers have excellent defense, three starters with power arms, and a very good if not exactly dominating closer. Of course most teams that get to the postseason have similar talent. We can dream. But let’s enjoy the day.

William Grimes opens his review of four books about books in today’s Times with an appalling factoid: today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade. What ’s a reader to do? Francine Prose, author of Reading Like a Writer, says, paradoxically, read more slowly. According to Grimes,

She has a notion, quite correct in my experience, that all readers start out slow, savoring individual syllables and words. Gradually, under pressure, they speed up, consuming more but enjoying and absorbing less.

Reading becomes information processing. The sheer bliss of the childhood reading experience comes to seem like a lost Eden, recaptured only in thrilling fits and starts or when time, mercifully, stands still. Prison and vacation make good readers.

That sounds right to me. I’d like to read that book when I get the time.

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association

Hardcovers

1. Celebration of Discipline, 25th Anniversary Edition
Richard Foster. Harper San Francisco

2. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

3. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

5. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

6. Cluny
Edwin Mullins. BlueBridge

7. The Shoemaker’s Gospel
Daniel Brent. Loyola Press

8. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser. Doubleday

9.The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

10. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, USCCB Publishing

Paperbacks

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

2. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

3. Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

4. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, USCCB Publishing

5. Waiting in Joyful Hope 2006: Daily Reflections for Advent and Christmas
Katherine L. Howard. Liturgical Press

6. The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

7. A Year of Sundays: Gospel Reflections 2007
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

8. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori Publications

9. WomenSaints
Madonna Sophia Compton et al. Crossroad

10. RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict
Liturgical Press

The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist

Something has happened
to the bread
and the wine.

They have been blessed.
What now?
The body leans forward

to receive the gift
from the priest’s hand,
then the chalice.

They are something else now
from what they were
before this began.

I want
to see Jesus
maybe in the clouds

or on the shore,
just walking,
beautiful man

and clearly
someone else
besides.

On the hard days
I ask myself
if I ever will.

Also there are times
my body whispers to me
that I have.

–Mary Oliver

Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, is a most unusual monk. He’s a poet, patristics scholar, and professor who teaches both in Rome and at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon, his monastery. He’s also the author of A Monk’s Alphabet, one of the most unusual books of this publishing season. The book consists of 196 short essays, reflections, and ruminations, arranged alphabetically from Airplane to Zerr. (Bonaventure Zerr was the seventh abbott of Mount Angel. Father Driscoll’s moving account of his death concludes the book.) He is a writer of exceptional talent and insight.

Great writers such as Pascal and Marcus Aurelius employed the genre of short, provisional essays, loosely organized, and Father Driscoll makes good use of the freedom the form offers. Here, for example, is his opinon of “Smugness:”

“God so hates religious smugness and self-satisfaction and the certainty that the other is a sinner and will go to hell that he would empty hell completely of the sinners who deservedly belong there and place the smug one there all alone to pass an eternity of painful astonishment, learning that God has mercy on whom he will. Should some faint sense of desiring to adore the One who is so merciful crack even slightly the bitterness of this terribly misused virtuous one, maybe then even hell would be emptied of him.

“In short, it is not for me to judge, not for me to presume to pronounce on others. ‘The last shall be first, and the first last.’”

Small publishing all about managing cash flow, says Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, and the challenge is enormous: “the publisher absorbs the vast majority of financial risk in the entire supply chain of writer to reader (the cascade of returnable product all ends at the publisher, but not to the printer), and the first cent a publisher sees is 120 days after the book first ships, and yet everyone else has gotten paid already.”

Nash pays small advances: $300 to $1000. “Anything I can do to make the process one in which risk is more evenly distributed, I will do. This means of course that it’s hard to work with non-fiction writers with opportunity costs (the freelance money or magazine money forgone) since the advance is expected to offset that. By necessity I work with writers who have sources of income beyond selling books.”

The Nash interview requires a subscription. Booksquare has a summary.

Cosmas or the Love of God, the latest book in the Loyola Classics series, is a short, quiet novel, written by a French banker three decades ago, about a man with a failed monastic vocation. This doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but the book is a gem. The setting is La Trappe, the mother monastery of the Trappists, where a spiritual drama unfolds. Cosmas is a pious, sensitive young man who is convinced that he has a Trappist vocation. But the reality of monastic life disappoints him badly. It seems too worldly. The shortcomings of other monks scandalize him. He leaves, returns, leaves again. Cosmas is convinced that his vocation is real. His monastic superiors are inclined to think so too. It’s a quandary, and Fr. Jim Martin S.J. in his introduction to the book draws out its large implications: “Does unhappiness in a job, or in a friendship, or in a marriage, mean that one should switch careers, sever a relationship or even end a marriage? This is Cosmas’s dilemma. As the narrator asks, ‘Was Cosmas really called to religious life? No other question has ever disturbed me so much.’”

Cosmas keeps trying to follow his inner call. La Trappe’s abbot extends the lesson of Cosmas to everyone “who suffers from this gap between their aspirations and their attainments.” That is, to all of us. And may we achieve the heroism the abbot finds in Cosmas. Those not blessed with exceptional talent or grace carry on, the abbot says. “In their eyes the sense of inadequacy, of getting nowhere, and their failures, do not relieve them of the responsibility to keep on trying.”

Cosmas created a stir in French literary circles when Pierre de Calan published it at age sixty-six. De Calan was a banker and a family man. He had never been a monk. To a critic surprised that a businessman could write such a polished novel, he said “a man who lives only for his work lives only a half-life.”

For more on this great, unusual novel, read Fr. Jim Martin’s introduction here.

Should we trust the blurbs that we read on the covers and jackets of new books? Are they honest expressions of the opinions of the blurbers? Writer Barry Eisler is doubtful. The blurber has many reasons to praise a book — even if he or she doesn’t like it, or doesn’t even intend to read it. “There are some honest blurbs out there. But most of them are anything but,” he writes. Some disagree with cynical Barry. At least in part. Scroll down and read the comments to his post. You’ll find a different view here.

My question is: do blurbs actually sell books? Or, to put it more precisely, are they worth the trouble?

Several weeks ago, author Chris Lowney set out on the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Lowney took the long trek to launch his new organization Pilgrimage for Our Children’s Future, which funds education and healthcare projects in the third world. This morning Chris announced on his blog that he had been laid low by a respiratory infection, and was not going to be able to finish the pilgrimage.

He won’t be down for long. I got to know Chris when I worked with him on his book Heroic Leadership, a superbly perceptive account of the genius and continuing relevance of Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuits. The role of pilgrim suits Chris well. He was a Jesuit for seven years, then an investment banker for J.P. Morgan. He’s now embarked on a third career as strategist for third world development. He’s also working on another book for Loyola Press. Read Heroic Leadership. Check out Pilgrimage for Our Children’s Future. Keep your eye on Chris Lowney.

A New York publicist gives some free advice to authors. Here is a list for new authors. Here is a list for veterans. “Here’s what you need to remember: Your publicist is the medium through which you communicate to the rest of the world. The better informed she is, the better she can serve you. . . . she’ll do her best to promote you and your work. Value her opinion. She isn’t saying “no” to be mean, but because she doesn’t think that a particular activity is valuable expenditure of your time or her budget.”

Jody Bottum thinks that J.F. Powers is the greatest writer of the Catholic renaissance of the 1950s, but also the one who has faded the most. Powers’ Morte d’Urban won the National Book Award in 1963, and he is regarded as one of the masters of the short story. But he little read now. The reason, says Bottum, is that Powers’ literary world was too narrow. He wrote about middle-aged Catholic priests in Midwestern parishes in the years before Vatican II. The contrast between their comic clerical foibles and the reality of what priests do in the sacraments was an “extremely efficient device for the fiction writer’s task of showing human life as the intersection of the mundane and the divine.” But this special Catholic world vanished in the 1960s and 70s, and interest in J. F. Powers went with it. Concludes Bottum: “He really was the finest American Catholic writer of the twentieth century. And that century is over.”

Read Bottum’s essay here. And read Powers too. None of his books were in print when he died in 1999, but they’ve since been reissued by The New York Review of Book Press. Check here.

The Bethany House art department generated 14 covers for the new book Relentless, a Christian-themed thriller involving “a vast web of intrigue that stretches from an underground global conspiracy to a prophecy dating back over seven thousand years.” The author, Robin Parrish, has posted all of them here, along with commentary. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the process of book cover design. I’m also impressed that Bethany House would spend so much money on one book cover.

Because you’re reading this, I thought you’d be interested in some stats about blogs. This is from a recent telephone poll of 7000 Americans by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

• 57 million Americans read blogs. You’re in good company.
• About 12 million Americans write a blog
• 55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym. (Not here. Jim Manney is my real name.)
• 37 percent of bloggers blog about “my life and experiences.” (Not me, except for an occasional account of a baseball game.)
• 64 percent of bloggers blog to share practical knowledge or skills with others. (I share everything I know.)
• 44 percent of bloggers have published their writing elsewhere. (I have.)

Read the whole Pew blogging report here.

I like the Atlanta Braves well enough, but I’m not a special fan. They’re 18 games behind the Mets in the NL East, and I’m looking forward to a Tigers-Mets World Series. But Sister Marian of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne loves her Braves. She went to a Braves game when she was a young nun, and had that baseball epiphany that smites the true fan. “She adored everything about it: the grass, the sun, the fans, the players and the pretzels,” writes Jack Curry of the Times. Six days a week, Sister Marian cares for dying cancer patients, the ministry of the Hawthorne Dominicans. Her favorite thing to do on her day off is, naturally, to go to a Braves game. Bobby Dews, the Braves’ bullpen coach, is a close friend of Sister Marian. He’s moved by her work with the dying. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know there are people, earthly people, who care about us the way God does,” he says.

Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life became a mega best-seller largely because evangelical churches bought copies by the truckload. The book became the basis of a widespread church growth movement advancing the “purposes” of worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism. Some of these purpose-driven churches have not flourished, reports The Wall Street Journal. Congregations have divided over efforts to transform their churches. Many object to “Madison Avenue-style marketing.” Some think the gospel is being watered down to appeal to the unchurched. “I believe Jesus died for everybody, not just people in a ‘target audience,’” said one dissenting minister. Says Warren:

“There is no growth without change and there is no change without loss and there is no loss without pain,” he says. “Probably 10% of all churches are in conflict at any given point, regardless of what they’re doing.” That, he contends, “is not just symptomatic of changing to purpose-driven. It would be symptomatic in changing to anything.”

Douglas Jones admits that Flannery O’Connor is a hard sell, even to Christians aware of her greatness: “Even when people know about her superior technique and Christian frames, they still usually choke after a story or two. Too rough. Too troubling. They’re not hard to read, they’ll admit, but still, there’s all that weirdness and death.” Jones argues that we’re troubled by O’Connor because we think that all evil is bad. Not so: “All evil is not bad. Some evil comes to shake us out of our sin; some evil comes to liberate us. Some evil is a gift of grace. Grace gnashes.” This is what O’Connor’s stories demonstrate time and again.

In Flannery’s world, dark grace intrudes regularly. People who would have been handed over to let their sin slowly destroy them get this amazing explosion of grace that turns them inside out. Because of this, her stories start to read like gift after gift after gift. You start to long for more dark grace in actual life since it produces such wonderful turns of redemption. . . . Let her show you how surprising grace is, how dark and healthy it can be, what a gift it is.”

Read the whole thing.