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

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association. Six of the books (including both #1s) are by Protestants from a secular publisher. And Matthew Kelly returns after a month’s absence.

Hardcovers

1. Religious Literacy
Stephen Prothero. Harper San Francisco

2. Broken Trust
Patrick Fleming, Sue Lauber-Fleming, Mark T. Matousek. Crossroad

3. A Book of Hours
Merton & Deignan. Ave Maria Press

4. Sunday Celebration in the Absence of a Priest
USCCB Publishing

5. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Ballantine

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

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

8. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon

9. Amazing Grace
Eric Metaxas. Harper San Francisco

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

Paperbacks

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

2. The Sacrament of Charity
Pope Benedict XVI. Pauline Books & Media/USCCB Publishing

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

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

5. The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song
John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak. Crossroad

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

7. The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

8. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

9. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticania/USCCB Publishing

10. The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics
C. S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

Brian Moore’s 1972 novel Catholics is a short, intense parable that depicts both a possible Catholic future and the inner struggle for faith. The story tells of a fierce conflict between Catholics with very different views of the nature of the Mass, the efficacy of prayer, and the content of faith. It invites the reader to examine the basic issues of belief. How do we have a relationship with the hidden God? How to we resolve the tension between faith and doubt?

Catholics takes place in an imagined near future. Vatican Council IV has completed the Catholic Church’s capitulation to the spirit of secularism. Talks leading to a merger between Catholicism and Buddhism are proceeding nicely. Church authorities understand the Mass to be a purely symbolic ritual. Religion is seen as primarily an engine of social change.

The monks at Muck Abbey, on a wind-swept island off the west coast of Ireland, maintain one of the last remaining centers of the traditional Catholic faith. They remain deeply attached to the rosary, private confession, the real presence, and other practices that the church considers outmoded. Pilgrims from around the world flock to the abbey to attend the Latin Mass and receive the old sacraments. This worries and embassasses Church authorities, and they dispatch an American priest named James Kinsella to the island to shut down this scandalous anachronism.

Facing Kinsella is Tomás O’Malley, the abbot of Muck. Abbot Tomás turns out to be a complicated character. He lost his faith years ago, and goes through the motions of worship and piety because that is expected of him. But the abbot is engaged in a profound inner struggle. He resists God because he deeply fears the implications of a sincere act of faith.

Tomás is caught between Kinsella’s passionate secularism and his duty to the pious monks. He must choose. His choice, its implications, and the circumstances that lead to it make for an absorbing story that deals with important questions of religion and personal faith.

Though it was published in 1972, Catholics articulates debates and anxieties that have agitated the Catholic Church since the end of Vatican Council II in 1965. The Council altered traditional liturgical practices, and opened the church to a sympathetic engagement with other religions and post-Enlightenment ideas. Catholics examines the risks of this new openness. How far should the church go in accommodating the modern world? How important are traditional liturgical practices and devotions? What price does the Church pay in making changes in its practices, desirable as these changes may be?

The novel also raises profound questions about the nature of faith. Can people of faith nevertheless harbor doubts about God? Does doubt eventually overwhelm faith? What’s the relationship between the essentials of faith and the traditions and practices by which faith is conveyed and expressed? Sitting before the tabernacle, Abbot Tomás regrets his loss of faith:

Aggiornamento, was that when uncertainty had begun? Changes of doctrine. Setting oneself up as ultimate authority. Insubordination. He looked at the tabernacle. Insubordination. The beginning of breakdown. And, long ago, that righteous prig at Wittenberg nailing his defiance to the church door.

Some say the book closely reflects the religious attitudes of the author. Brian Moore claimed to have abandoned the Catholic faith of his youth, but questions of faith haunt his novels.

Moore’s preoccupation with faith brings to mind the work of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor, in contrast to Brian Moore, was a fervent Catholic. She memorably replied to an acquaintance who thought that the Eucharist was a symbol, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Yet, in her fiction, true faith comes no more easily to her characters than it does to Abbot Tomás in Catholics. Faith that is glib and self-satisfied is relentlessly exposed as bogus. See especially her novel, Wise Blood, and the short stories “Revelation,” “The Displaced Person,” “Parker’s Back,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Who do you ask to critique your ideas? You have a choice, and the choice makes a big difference, says Seth Godin.

Can you think like an editor? Find out by betting on book proposals posted on the Media Predict website, a virtual prediction market modeled on online markets that allow traders to bet on election results and box office recepits of Hollywood movies.

Traders are given $5000 in fantasy cash, which they then use to bet on the success of real book proposals submitted by agents to editors at Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint. In September, Touchstone will select five proposals for serious consideration. One or more may actually be published. Traders are betting on these winners.

S&S hopes the market will help it gauge popular tastes. Touchstone’s publisher says that the market “could do for book publishing what focus groups do for soap and soda and what screening audiences do for movies.”

Some 10,000 digital files of poems are available for download from PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. Many sites offer streaming audio of poems. PennSound claims to have the most extensive collection of downloadable MP3 files. The site specializes in historical avant-garde and contemporary poetry.

A quarrel between literary bloggers and mainstream book reviewers seems to be dying down, according to the LA Times.

Terry Teachout likes the idea of reading abridged versions of classic novels like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Vanity Fair. “The older I get, the more I appreciate those artists who say what they have to say, then shut up. Is there a more powerfully moving novel than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 56,000-word The Great Gatsby?”

I reread another Loyola Classic, Evelyn Waugh’s historical novel Helena. It tells the story of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who is honored as the woman who journeyed to Jerusalem in the third century A.D. and recovered the True Cross on which Jesus died. You can order the book here.

Helena is very unlike the other novels that cemented Waugh’s reputation as one of the great satirists and prose stylists of the twentieth century. The jubilant malice of Vile Bodies and The Loved One is absent, as is the elegiac splendor of Brideshead Revisited. The style of Helena is unusual. It has the form of a historical novel, but the language, dialogue, and sensibility are that of the post-Edwardian upper class British society of the author’s youth. Helena has often been neglected by fans of Waugh, yet it was the author’s favorite novel of all his works. He wrote, “technically, this is the most ambitious work of a writer who is devoted to the niceties of his craft.” His daughter Harriet says that Helena was “the only one of his books that he ever cared to read aloud to the whole family.”

Waugh probably made third-century Romans speak like twentieth-century Londoners because he aimed the book directly at the spiritual malaise of his times. Helena is Waugh’s most intentional statement about the truth of Christianity. Two questions lie at the heart of the story: what is true religion? and how does one become a saint?

These are the concerns that drive Helena on her epic journey from the household of a British chieftain to an honored place in the imperial court of Byzantium. Helena is an exuberant, “horse-mad,” young woman who is married to Constantius, a Roman officer who rises to become co-regent of the empire in the west. Constantius divorces Helena for a more politically advantageous marriage, but not before she gives birth to a son, the future Constantine the Great. When Constantine succeeds his father as emperor, he recalls his mother from exile and installs her at court.

All along, Helena is determined to find the truth of things. She converts to a Christian faith that is firmly rooted in the teaching of the apostles and the facts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Her faith is contrasted with the hollow gnosticism of her husband and her son. The arrogant Constantine strikes a modern utopian tone when he scornfully takes leave of Pope Sylvester before departing for his new capital: “You can have your old Rome, Holy Father, with its Peter and Paul and its tunnels full of martyrs. We start with no unpleasant associations; in innocence, with Divine Wisdom and Peace.”

Helena is drawn precisely to these “tunnels full of martyrs.” For her, and for Waugh, Christianity rests on the tangible historical reality of Jesus and what he did. She journeys to Jerusalem to find the actual Cross of Christ. Its location is revealed to her in a vision. Its authenticity is verified by a miraculous healing. This physical lump of wood testifies to the truth. Without it, Christianity is just an appealing idea. With it, a window opens on the supernatural. God does not save us by delivering us from our humanity, as the gnostics say. Rather, he saves us by entering this world and embracing it.

This life-long quest for the truth makes Helena a saint. The poet John Betjeman complained to Waugh that in the novel, Helena “doesn’t seem like a saint.” Waugh replied that everyone has his own form of sanctity. “It is no good my saying. ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh.” He continued:

I liked Helena’s sanctity because it is in contrast to all that moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn’t thrown to the lions, she wasn’t a contemplative, she didn’t look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God has chosen for her to do and did it.

Yesterday was publication day for Pope Benedict’s much-anticipated book Jesus of Nazareth. Newsweek has posted an excerpt on its website, along with a review by George Weigel and an essay by Lisa Miller, who writes “Faith may actually be the most productive approach to finding truth in Scripture; the historical method has so far gleaned very little in the way of facts.”

The excerpt is from Benedict’s discussion of Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. This is a surprising event in scripture. Why did sinless Jesus need to be baptized? Benedict sees it as the beginning of his mission to lift the burden of sin from humankind:

Looking at the events in light of the Cross and Resurrection, the Christian people realized what happened: Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan. He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture is an anticipation of the Cross. He is, as it were, the true Jonah who said to the crew of the ship, “Take me and throw me into the sea” (Jon 1:12).

An archive of about 300 letters from Flannery O’Connor to her favorite correspondent will be unsealed this week at the Emory University library, where they have been sealed for 20 years. They are letters to Betty Hester, a friend of O’Connor’s. The two wrote to each other nearly every week from 1955 to O’Connor’s death in 1964.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the details here (registration required).

The business section of the Sunday New York Times has a comprehensive book-publishing-is-a-crazy-business feature story. Profit margins are small, it’s impossible to predict successful books, and publishers know very little about their customers. About 70 percent of trade books lose money.

Still, book publishing has a business model. It depends on books that sell well year after year, and on frontlist best-sellers, which the Times piece describes as unpredictable. Said one publisher: “The whole thing is educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. You just try to make sure your upside mistakes make up for your downside mistakes.”

The reporter theorizes that people like us make book publishing a bad business. “Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance.” She quotes an editor who draws the conclusion: “The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,” Mr. Strachan said.

But it might be the other way around. Everybody knows that no one gets rich in book publishing, so it attracts people who care about other things.

I’ve been rereading the Loyola Classics lately and doing some writing about them. I thought I’d post some of what I’ve written here. First up is Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness. You can order the book here.

The Edge of Sadness became a bestseller in the sixties in part because of its scandalous elements. Edwin O’Connor took direct aim at the popular stereotype of the Catholic priest in America. This was the picture of the priest as a super-competent, authoritarian, but loveable leader; a wise counselor, a gregarious extrovert, and a heroic celibate (who could nevertheless flirt with the ladies).

Father Hugh Kennedy, the central character of The Edge of Sadness, is a listless, heart-sick, recovering alcoholic. He is trying to renew his priesthood in a decaying inner-city parish, but he can’t connect with his immigrant flock. He’s tormented by his past. He looks on the future with apprehension. This is no Bing Crosby, playing the enchanting Father Chuck O’Malley in “Going My Way.”

O’Connor presents his dyspeptic vision of American Catholicism with considerable literary skill. The Edge of Sadness won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1962, and the novel is cherished for its psychological perception, memorable characters, and spiritual insight. O’Connor was challenging more than stereotypes about priests. He didn’t buy the cheerful story that the self-assured Irish-dominated American Catholic Church told about itself. Beneath the façade of poise and confidence is a world of loneliness, lost ideals, selfishness, and bleakness of soul. Father Kennedy’s parish is a metaphor for the Church as a whole:

This is not the kind of parish in which a great rapport obtains between the shepherd and his flock. We are all more or less strangers to one another. And most of all, I’m afraid, I’m a stranger in this smallest and dreariest part of my parish where – all moving pictures to the contrary – I can assure you that the priest is not this legendary, revered, and welcome figure, capable of healing with a glance.

The Edge of Sadness reminds readers of a later time why Pope John XXIII was wise to call for a Vatican Council II to update and renew the Church. Renewal has far to go, and some changes might have been ill-advised, but no one should wax nostalgic for the Catholicism of the 1950s.

The novel is suffused with nostalgia of another kind – nostalgia for the vanishing Irish culture that deeply influenced American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. O’Connor etches this in his vivid portrait of the large Carmody family, whose involvement with Father Kennedy constitutes much of the plot of the novel. Charlie Carmody, the wealthy 81-year-old patriarch, epitomizes the old garrulous authoritarian style, but his children have become estranged from him. They aren’t Irish anymore. They have become Americans: busy, impatient, modern.

At a Carmody party, Father Kennedy watches Charlie and his cronies talk:

It was the same talk with which I had grown up, the talk which belonged, really, to another era, and which now must have been close to disappearing, the talk of old men and old women for whom the simple business of talking had always been the one great recreation. And so the result was the long, winding, old-fashioned parade of extraordinary reminiscence and anecdote and parochial prejudice and crotchety improbable behavior…the newer, smoother, tolerances had not yet arrived.

At the end of the novel, Father Kennedy is visited by grace. The bishop offers him a new assignment, but he chooses to stay in his dreary, down-at-the-heels parish. He understands he will be there for the rest of his life, something “I felt with a touch of regret, an edge of sadness.” But sadness was only at the edge. Inside was renewed hope that his vocation will be renewed, that he will serve his people well as their priest.

Perhaps Hugh Kennedy’s renewal is a metaphor for a larger renewal that Edwin O’Connor perceived: that a troubled Church contains within itself the seeds of conversion.

Simon & Schuster has announced plans for an internet book channel called bookvideos.tv. It will be hosted on YouTube and other video sharing sites, and it will feature up to 40 books and authors at one time. It will launch in June

The Wall Street Journal (subscriber-only) says that the videos will be two-minute personality-driven features focusing on authors rather than specific titles. They will be especially aimed at book-club members and fans of authors, who are interested in personal details about their favorite writers.

This video, featuring Dean Koontz, could well be a model for these features.

The line between podcasts and audiobooks is blurring as book publishers and authors experiment with the audio format, reports The Times. Some authors are producing podcasts based on work-in-progress and selling them on iTunes. Some publishers are releasing audiobooks early as a way of building interest in the print book. Says one publisher, “It helps to have a steady stream of product from major authors so we have something to sell between their big books.”

From The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola:

The goal of our life is to live with God forever.
God, who loves us, gave us life.
Our own response of love allows God’s life
to flow into us without limit.

All the things in this world are gifts of God,
presented to us so that we can know God more easily
and to make a return of love more readily.

As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God
insofar as they help us develop as loving persons.
But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives,
they displace God and so hinder our growth toward our goal.

In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance
before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice
and are not bound by some obligation.

We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
a deeper response to our life in God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better leads
to God’s deepening life in me.

John Allen has the first review of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, sure to be the religious book of the year. Allen has been reading the Italian edition. The book will be published in English in the U.S. on May 15.

Allen looks at the book as a Vatican insider. Why this topic? Why now? Because Christology — “striving to put the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith back together again” — is a central concern of this papacy. “Put in a nutshell, Benedict’s thesis in Jesus of Nazareth is that there can be no humane social order or true moral progress apart from a right relationship with God; try as it might, a world organized etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if God does not exist,’ will be dysfunctional and ultimately inhumane.”

Sister Lise Fanshawe isn’t your typical nun. Before joining the sisters of Bethany she had been first a prostitute, then a brothel manager, and finally a murderer. She killed the man who had originally seduced her in order to keep him from abusing a young woman. Lise served a long sentence for the crime in a French prison, which is where she encountered the Bethany nuns – an order dedicated to serving prisoners, prostitutes, and other outcast women.

Lise is the central character in Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, the latest novel to be reissued in the Loyola Classics series. It’s a somber but inspiring tale, set in mid-century Paris. Lise’s conversion is depicted in entirely convincing fashion despite (or perhaps because of) its melodramatic elements. She becomes a new person, and dedicates her life to the difficult work of serving other women caught in the misery that used to entangle her. The story is credible because it is realistic. Lise’s ministry is fruitful, but in the end it takes a tragic turn. This is a darker story than In This House of Brede, Godden’s other classic tale of nuns. It shows how the mercy of God extends to the darkest human places.

Here is Sister Joan Chittister’s introduction to the Loyola Classics edition. Click here to buy the book.