2023 End-of-Year Letter
Dear Readers,
Ten years into our existence, Wiseblood Books continues to bear witness to literature that explores the eternal questions—with unflinching wide-eyes. What began as a fool’s errand (I used to pile up royalty pennies to calculate how many cans of beans, how many onions we could buy from the co-op) has become a stable home to some of the most "counter, original, spare, [and] strange" literature being published today. That word home is more than a metaphor: through the prodigal generosity of many donors, the unsung sacrifices of editors and typesetters and cover designers, and the artistic excellence of our authors, Wiseblood’s literary apartment complex is getting wonderfully crowded. If you’re in the business of covering sins by giving alms, we could use your help making more room at our table. God willing, we are just beginning.
Here are some of next year’s notable publications and a blessed record of this past year’s successes:
Ten years into our existence, Wiseblood Books continues to bear witness to literature that explores the eternal questions—with unflinching wide-eyes. What began as a fool’s errand (I used to pile up royalty pennies to calculate how many cans of beans, how many onions we could buy from the co-op) has become a stable home to some of the most "counter, original, spare, [and] strange" literature being published today. That word home is more than a metaphor: through the prodigal generosity of many donors, the unsung sacrifices of editors and typesetters and cover designers, and the artistic excellence of our authors, Wiseblood’s literary apartment complex is getting wonderfully crowded. If you’re in the business of covering sins by giving alms, we could use your help making more room at our table. God willing, we are just beginning.
Here are some of next year’s notable publications and a blessed record of this past year’s successes:
2023 started with a splash–of comic muck cast off the boot of good François Rabelais. That a verse play featuring John Calvin, St. Ignatius, and Rabelais sold out all three of its Wiseblood Books-sponsored debut performances in New York City reveals Jane Clark Scharl’s uncanny capacity to make the impossible plausible. Sonnez Les Matines imagines what might have happened if these three brilliant, volatile men had to put their convictions to the test while navigating a brutal crime and their own involvement in it. The play has garnered a laurel of reviews, including these in New Criterion, The European Conservative, The Easy Chair, Fare Forward, Cistercium, and Slant Books' Close Reading. Jane brings her conversational graces to not a few podcast appearances on Catholic Culture, I Might Believe in Fairies, Anselm Society, and Let Go the Goat.
At the end of his Ad Fontes review, veteran critic John Wilson concludes: “I can’t wait to read–and perhaps even see–the rest of the trilogy.” Well, have we got good news for you (keep reading)! |
Fragile Objects, Katy Carl’s much-anticipated debut short story collection, did not stir the literary streams for nothing. Katy ruminates on the New York City launch over at her Substack Depth-Perception HERE (Trevor Cribben Merrill also read from his novel Minor Indignities at the Arthouse 2B event). This follow-up to her debut novel As Earth Without Water proves beyond a reasonable doubt that we are watching a writer of rare talent. In First Things, Glenn Arbery situates Carl as a new and very different heir to our press’ patroness Flannery O’Connor: “one cannot help but recognize the risks she takes as a writer. She never goes the way of harmless revelation. These stories lodge in the mind uncomfortably and call for another reading—and still another—as the best stories do.” Nick Ripatrazone concludes that "Authentic, meaningful fiction [ can ] only be created by writers who love[] their characters — in all of their follies, paradoxes, and sins. Katy Carl loves her characters." In Our Sunday Visitor, Mike Mastromatteo finds the complexities of the collection “meshing to invite readers to reflect on such intangible concerns as spiritual restlessness, motivation, confusion, doubt and inescapable yearning.” John-Paul Heil, who praised Carl’s As Earth Without Water in the Los Angeles Review of Books, celebrates her short stories’ dramatizations of our sundry vulnerabilities—and the tragic weight of our often neglected souls, in Fare Forward. Mary Grace Mangano revisits Carl’s work in the pages of America, Shemiah Gonzales praises Katy’s brilliance on Undaunted Joy, and Seth Wieck and Carl share this rich Socratic dialogue–an education in itself–with us in Front Porch Republic.
With no small dose of wonder and awe, we also saw the publication of Seren of the Wildwood, a long fantasy story in verse by Marly Youmans, an award-winning author of over fifteen books, including, most recently her novel, Charis in the World of Wonders. Appreciating the way in which Seren “whispers to our fractured souls,” Makoto Fujimura calls the poem “an adventure that is at once psychologically potent and fantastical,” and Amit Majmudar illumines that Youmans, by “hybridizing the ‘bob and wheel’ of medieval poetry with the iambic pentameter narratives of the Romantic and Victorian era, conjures a time-frame outside time, perfectly suited to the story. This book is itself a ‘Wildwood’ where fey, elusive, illusory phenomena draw the protagonist—and the reader—deeper and deeper into mystery.” Seren contains cover and interior illustrations by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. While the book’s virtues have been sung from a number of quarters, a few can be found here: in Catholic World Report; in Slant’s Close Reading, where Jonathan Geltner probes “The Spirit of Fantasy and the Sense of Place”; in Brazen Head; and D.S. Martin’s Kingdom Poets. Glynn Young remarked: “It’s the kind of work that you know is changing you as you read it, & you emerge from it as not quite the same person you were before.” In The Hollins Critic, Amanda Cockrell reads the long poem as “a visionary journey through motherhood and the rebellious, unwieldy life force of the universe.” In “Testing and Transformation,” Tessa Carman calls Youmans a “master enchanter whose visionary novels and poetry deserve, even demand, rereading and reading aloud.” Youmans joined Thomas Mirus of Catholic Culture in a captivating interview “to talk about her new verse tale, Seren of the Wildwood, the story’s relation to the biblical giants or Nephilim, and the difference between myth and faerie.”
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nd what a delight to travel vicariously with Wiseblood authors Marly Youmans and Sally Thomas on their joint reading tour to visit several cities and their hospitable bookstores. Thomas’ 2022 novel Works of Mercy continues to garner great reviews, including Tessa Carman’s ode to spiritual motherhood, published in Plough. Carman’s essay, a gem in its own right, notes that “Both [Sigrid] Undset and Thomas weave tales marked by theological vitality and spiritual depth, as well as vivid characters and prose. In Kristin, motherhood flows river-like throughout the three volumes; in Works of Mercy, it flows more like a meandering stream, but no less powerfully.”
100 Visions of War, Alfred Nicol’s translations of Julien Vocane’s World War I haiku, also remains a living literary testament, keeping us honest about the costs of war and the limits and reaches of the human spirit. In the Friday Poem, Maryann Corbett argues that “reading Julien Vocance’s sobering little poems, ably translated in this little book, is almost a moral obligation.” And HERE, in this extended television interview with Gayle Heney, the great-hearted Alfred Nicol discusses–with passion and intelligence–the peculiar origins and staying power of 100 Visions. Over a year after the book’s publication, it is still receiving new reviews, as in Lightwood, where Mary Beth Hines calls the translation “a triumph.”
In his review of J. V. Cunningham’s The Exclusions of a Rhyme in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul Pastor noted that Cunningham:
is able to write of squalor and the collapse, of vagaries and betrayals, of “love as quiet as regret / And love like anger in the night,” only because he
has, for his support, the consolation of having learned. Something is gained, something gleaned. “The voyage of the soul is simply / Through age to
wisdom,” Cunningham writes in “The Helmsman: An Ode,” “But wisdom, if it comes, / Comes like the ripening gleam of wheat.”
Happily, both The Collected Prose of John Finlay and his Collected Poems are now well-preserved in beautiful cloth editions. Learn more about the capacious, eccentric, formalist who converted to Catholicism HERE. Meanwhile, in celebration of Bloomsday, Wiseblood also made Fr. Colum Power’s James Joyce’s Catholic Categories available in a durable hardcover on which you could float over to Dublin, no problem.
100 Visions of War, Alfred Nicol’s translations of Julien Vocane’s World War I haiku, also remains a living literary testament, keeping us honest about the costs of war and the limits and reaches of the human spirit. In the Friday Poem, Maryann Corbett argues that “reading Julien Vocance’s sobering little poems, ably translated in this little book, is almost a moral obligation.” And HERE, in this extended television interview with Gayle Heney, the great-hearted Alfred Nicol discusses–with passion and intelligence–the peculiar origins and staying power of 100 Visions. Over a year after the book’s publication, it is still receiving new reviews, as in Lightwood, where Mary Beth Hines calls the translation “a triumph.”
In his review of J. V. Cunningham’s The Exclusions of a Rhyme in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paul Pastor noted that Cunningham:
is able to write of squalor and the collapse, of vagaries and betrayals, of “love as quiet as regret / And love like anger in the night,” only because he
has, for his support, the consolation of having learned. Something is gained, something gleaned. “The voyage of the soul is simply / Through age to
wisdom,” Cunningham writes in “The Helmsman: An Ode,” “But wisdom, if it comes, / Comes like the ripening gleam of wheat.”
Happily, both The Collected Prose of John Finlay and his Collected Poems are now well-preserved in beautiful cloth editions. Learn more about the capacious, eccentric, formalist who converted to Catholicism HERE. Meanwhile, in celebration of Bloomsday, Wiseblood also made Fr. Colum Power’s James Joyce’s Catholic Categories available in a durable hardcover on which you could float over to Dublin, no problem.
Seneca and the Madness of Hercules by Dana Gioia
In The Catholic Herald, Nick Ripatrazone situates Gioia’s project like so: “a contemporary Catholic artist offering a useful new vision of an essential writer of the past. Gioia’s volume includes an expansive essay that provides introductory and contextual material; not since T. S. Eliot’s essay 'Seneca in Elizabethan Translation' in 1927 has a contemporary poet of Gioia’s style undertaken such a comprehensive look at the Roman writer.” Seneca received strong notices in Cynthia Haven’s The Book Haven and Gioia, the consummate conversationalist, appeared on several podcasts, including First Things, The Cost of Glory, Stoa Conversations, and Antigone Journal.
The Moon on Elba by Andrew Frisardi received a rousing recommendation by Timothy Bartel and a thoughtful review in Fare Forward, where Tessa Carman observes that the book “was grown in rich soil, and its lines are profuse with the sensitivity and intelligence of well-ordered memory and a finely tuned ear.” Brian Palmer, Editor of THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, proclaimed of Frisardi’s latest “what a pleasurable experience to read poetry that beats, alliterates, and rhymes: In The Moon on Elba, Frisardi strikes, cleaves, and polishes lines of dazzling prosody.”
In The Catholic Herald, Nick Ripatrazone situates Gioia’s project like so: “a contemporary Catholic artist offering a useful new vision of an essential writer of the past. Gioia’s volume includes an expansive essay that provides introductory and contextual material; not since T. S. Eliot’s essay 'Seneca in Elizabethan Translation' in 1927 has a contemporary poet of Gioia’s style undertaken such a comprehensive look at the Roman writer.” Seneca received strong notices in Cynthia Haven’s The Book Haven and Gioia, the consummate conversationalist, appeared on several podcasts, including First Things, The Cost of Glory, Stoa Conversations, and Antigone Journal.
The Moon on Elba by Andrew Frisardi received a rousing recommendation by Timothy Bartel and a thoughtful review in Fare Forward, where Tessa Carman observes that the book “was grown in rich soil, and its lines are profuse with the sensitivity and intelligence of well-ordered memory and a finely tuned ear.” Brian Palmer, Editor of THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, proclaimed of Frisardi’s latest “what a pleasurable experience to read poetry that beats, alliterates, and rhymes: In The Moon on Elba, Frisardi strikes, cleaves, and polishes lines of dazzling prosody.”
We had the tremendous honor of publishing two translations by Rhina P. Espaillat, winner of numerous prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, and (twice) the Howard Nemerov Sonnet award. This past year Rhina donated her papers to Boston College, which hosted the Red Shoe Event pictured above.
The Spring that Feeds the Torrent the poems of St. John of the Cross In her New Criterion review essay “Mystical Precision,” Jane Clark Scharl notes that “Espaillat’s commitment to form seems to imply that the more mystical the reality we are attempting to grasp, the more form can help us, and the more exact our language must become. Whatever one might call that ‘spring’ of all that exists—God, the divine, the sublime—and whether one is a believer, disbeliever, or simply unsure, Rhina Espaillat insists that in our search for the unsayable, we must walk the path of precision all the way until language itself ends.” Robert B. Shaw saw that “the language here is simply timeless,” Joan Bauer included The Spring that Feeds the Torrent in her recent reads, acknowledging that “I’m especially grateful for such a beautiful and very accessible edition.” In his introduction, the late poet Timothy Murphy remarks that “St. John was her father’s favorite poet, she has had him in memory from early childhood, and her Spanish rivals her mastery of English . . . Espaillat’s translations of these very substantial poems are coming so fluently that one wonders whether the Holy Spirit is not directing her pen in some sort of private Pentecost.” And on Catholic Culture, Carla Galdo serves as an arresting guide through the mingling of mystical theology and poetry in St. John’s freshly-tuned verses.
The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz tr. by Rhina P. Espaillat
Deborah Warren wrote that “Rhina Espaillat is the only translator I know who can render an original poem into English with perfect fidelity. Translation can be a kind of treachery: traduttore, traditore. It usually involves a trade-off—between a poem’s meaning and the form that is integral to its effect. The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run reproduces both. The poems do justice to every nuance without injecting anything that isn’t there. Readers are always at the mercy of the translator. But with a poem? Each word is freighted with such heavy responsibility! Robert Frost defined poetry as ‘what gets lost in translation’; Rhina Espaillat finds it every time.” Our edition begins with a nuanced, engaging introduction by the poet Sally Read.
Of Mark Shiffman’s What is Ideology?, Matthew B. Crawford–author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work–wrote that “Ideological thinking is impatient with aspects of the world that resist its intellectual schemas. They must be brought into conformity with the guiding vision, or else denounced. Shiffman contrasts this with the spirit of practical reason, and a corresponding mode of conducting politics, which requires attentiveness to an order that is not of our own making. Shiffman is the rare political theorist who brings deep anthropological insight to bear on the questions of political life.”
In commemoration of our ten-year anniversary, the first book we brought into being is on sale for only $4.00: Chesterton's Utopia of Usurers & Other Essays.
We are running out of room, but would be remiss if we didn’t mention Dana Gioia’s Christianity and Poetry, an expanded, definitive edition of the First Things essay readers voted their favorite of 2022. In collaboration with Dappled Things magazine, Gioia also edited a new collection of poems paying Homage to Søren Kierkegaard. Gioia continues to perform yeoman’s work for Catholic literature and we are all of us debtors to his devoted service, which no amount of prayers or pennies could repay.
The Spring that Feeds the Torrent the poems of St. John of the Cross In her New Criterion review essay “Mystical Precision,” Jane Clark Scharl notes that “Espaillat’s commitment to form seems to imply that the more mystical the reality we are attempting to grasp, the more form can help us, and the more exact our language must become. Whatever one might call that ‘spring’ of all that exists—God, the divine, the sublime—and whether one is a believer, disbeliever, or simply unsure, Rhina Espaillat insists that in our search for the unsayable, we must walk the path of precision all the way until language itself ends.” Robert B. Shaw saw that “the language here is simply timeless,” Joan Bauer included The Spring that Feeds the Torrent in her recent reads, acknowledging that “I’m especially grateful for such a beautiful and very accessible edition.” In his introduction, the late poet Timothy Murphy remarks that “St. John was her father’s favorite poet, she has had him in memory from early childhood, and her Spanish rivals her mastery of English . . . Espaillat’s translations of these very substantial poems are coming so fluently that one wonders whether the Holy Spirit is not directing her pen in some sort of private Pentecost.” And on Catholic Culture, Carla Galdo serves as an arresting guide through the mingling of mystical theology and poetry in St. John’s freshly-tuned verses.
The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz tr. by Rhina P. Espaillat
Deborah Warren wrote that “Rhina Espaillat is the only translator I know who can render an original poem into English with perfect fidelity. Translation can be a kind of treachery: traduttore, traditore. It usually involves a trade-off—between a poem’s meaning and the form that is integral to its effect. The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run reproduces both. The poems do justice to every nuance without injecting anything that isn’t there. Readers are always at the mercy of the translator. But with a poem? Each word is freighted with such heavy responsibility! Robert Frost defined poetry as ‘what gets lost in translation’; Rhina Espaillat finds it every time.” Our edition begins with a nuanced, engaging introduction by the poet Sally Read.
Of Mark Shiffman’s What is Ideology?, Matthew B. Crawford–author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work–wrote that “Ideological thinking is impatient with aspects of the world that resist its intellectual schemas. They must be brought into conformity with the guiding vision, or else denounced. Shiffman contrasts this with the spirit of practical reason, and a corresponding mode of conducting politics, which requires attentiveness to an order that is not of our own making. Shiffman is the rare political theorist who brings deep anthropological insight to bear on the questions of political life.”
In commemoration of our ten-year anniversary, the first book we brought into being is on sale for only $4.00: Chesterton's Utopia of Usurers & Other Essays.
We are running out of room, but would be remiss if we didn’t mention Dana Gioia’s Christianity and Poetry, an expanded, definitive edition of the First Things essay readers voted their favorite of 2022. In collaboration with Dappled Things magazine, Gioia also edited a new collection of poems paying Homage to Søren Kierkegaard. Gioia continues to perform yeoman’s work for Catholic literature and we are all of us debtors to his devoted service, which no amount of prayers or pennies could repay.
Forthcoming in 2024:
We begin with a 1,600+ page behemoth: a double-volume edition of Heimito von Doderer's novel The Demons, a sweeping portrayal of Vienna on the cusp of war. Notably, this Wiseblood edition features an expansive introduction by Georg Büchner Prize-winning novelist Martin Mosebach and, as an afterward, a never-before-available translation of Doderer’s essay “Form and Function of the Novel” (both translated by Vincent Kling). In my Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps, I outline the remarkable genesis of The Demons, too long out of print until now.
J. C. Whitehouse’s scintillating translation of Georges Bernanos’ Under Satan’s Sun continues our foray into old books that merit a new generation of readers. As Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book Award, observes: “The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters’ souls are on the line.” Under Satan’s Sun, Bernanos’ first novel, grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and holds on no matter the burn. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his Church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that come into play in the priest’s fateful encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.
We begin with a 1,600+ page behemoth: a double-volume edition of Heimito von Doderer's novel The Demons, a sweeping portrayal of Vienna on the cusp of war. Notably, this Wiseblood edition features an expansive introduction by Georg Büchner Prize-winning novelist Martin Mosebach and, as an afterward, a never-before-available translation of Doderer’s essay “Form and Function of the Novel” (both translated by Vincent Kling). In my Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps, I outline the remarkable genesis of The Demons, too long out of print until now.
J. C. Whitehouse’s scintillating translation of Georges Bernanos’ Under Satan’s Sun continues our foray into old books that merit a new generation of readers. As Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book Award, observes: “The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters’ souls are on the line.” Under Satan’s Sun, Bernanos’ first novel, grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and holds on no matter the burn. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his Church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that come into play in the priest’s fateful encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.
The rest of the year shimmers with a constellation of contributions to literary life. Consider the forthcoming Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture: Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World, the first extant full-length treatment Beha’s work, by Katy Carl; and Jane Austen’s Darkness by First Things editor Julia Yost. This full-length monograph grew out of Yost’s Compact essay “Austen’s Darkness,” in which she convinces us that “the ascents of single young ladies are shadowed by the descents of single old ladies, the comic plots are shadowed by dark intimations: that there is less love and more hatred in society than we care to admit, and that the plots’ common end in marriage is not the end.”
Perhaps, since finishing Works of Mercy, you’ve been pining for more fiction from Sally Thomas? In autumn we’ll publish her debut collection of short fiction, The Blackbird and Other Stories, which promises to please and challenge with the same skill and grace as her novel. We continue our commitment to contemporary formal verse with Painting Over the Growth Chart by Dan Rattelle and Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis. Our love of the oft-forgotten master remains true as we assemble and publish The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham, which would not be complete without an exhaustive introduction by James Matthew Wilson. Before the year ends you’ll have in your hands a copy of Jane Clark Scharl’s sequel to Sonnez Les Matines: she is busy offing the hilarious protagonist of her next verse play, The Death of Rabelais. Finally, it is with great joy and gratitude that we are partnering with Well-Read Mom to bring out a new edition of Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio accompanied by Reflections on the Father’s Love, a fascinating, far-reaching commentary composed by Dante expert Franco Nembrini.
When not at the Wiseblood desk or dancing to the Pogues (R.I.P. Shane MacGowan) with our toddler Avila; when not knocking on our brand new teenager Anaya's ever-closed door or reading Story of a Soul with our big-hearted seven year old Zelie; or going on long walks with my son Søren who is teaching me medieval history and trying to finish War and Peace before I can get there first; when not balancing the Wiseblood budget late at night with my wife Brittney (or even better, making an escape to the local co-op, where we can leave the budget behind and finish our sentences without interruption): I spent many of my waking and working hours teaching an invigorating seminar on Dostoevsky, graduate fiction workshops, the Art and Metaphysics of Fiction, and making ready for a 2024 course on the Catholic Imagination in Modern American Literature for the MFA at the University of St. Thomas, which continues to alter (for better, or worse, you ask?!) the lives of many, and which has been the greatest educational endeavor of my life, thanks to my incredible students, great books, and the steadfast leadership of James Matthew Wilson: with over sixty students in the program, we are preparing for year four of an experiment which has me convinced that while MFA culture is too often a flashy bubble over so much bankruptcy, the Catholic intellectual and literary traditions can allow the fine arts to flourish and transcend the artificialities of academia. 2024 will also see the publication of my second novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, a loose sequel to Infinite Regress, which received a once-in-a-lifetime review, alongside Katy Carl's As Earth Without Water (Wiseblood 2021), in The Los Angeles Review of Books. I threw in my two cents on Jon Fosse, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize, and discussed J. M. Coetzee’s latest inversion of Dante on a panel with Paul Pastor, Jane Scharl, and James Matthew Wilson at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. Did I mention that I had a stroke in July and was operating at a bit over half-capacity for much of the year? Likely then I failed to also announce some major news for Wiseblood Books:
In 2023, Mary Finnegan came aboard as our first ever Deputy Editor. She is the best manager and most devoted employee that the press has ever had. Through Mary’s presence, Wiseblood has experienced a much-needed organizational reconfiguration, and the new systems and processes she has put in place have already yielded good things for the future of the press. Armed with well-earned literary chops (and a cup or seven of Barry's Irish Tea), Mary comes to us with a practical background as a nurse in the operating room, and she is able to bring to bear the skills she learned there to her work in the hurly-burly of making books. She is able to look at the bigger picture without sacrificing the smallest iotas, and she weighs the worth of mortal words on the scales of first and last things. Her miraculous combination of efficacious action and depth of vision bode very well for what Wiseblood will become in the years not yet written.
Perhaps, since finishing Works of Mercy, you’ve been pining for more fiction from Sally Thomas? In autumn we’ll publish her debut collection of short fiction, The Blackbird and Other Stories, which promises to please and challenge with the same skill and grace as her novel. We continue our commitment to contemporary formal verse with Painting Over the Growth Chart by Dan Rattelle and Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis. Our love of the oft-forgotten master remains true as we assemble and publish The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham, which would not be complete without an exhaustive introduction by James Matthew Wilson. Before the year ends you’ll have in your hands a copy of Jane Clark Scharl’s sequel to Sonnez Les Matines: she is busy offing the hilarious protagonist of her next verse play, The Death of Rabelais. Finally, it is with great joy and gratitude that we are partnering with Well-Read Mom to bring out a new edition of Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio accompanied by Reflections on the Father’s Love, a fascinating, far-reaching commentary composed by Dante expert Franco Nembrini.
When not at the Wiseblood desk or dancing to the Pogues (R.I.P. Shane MacGowan) with our toddler Avila; when not knocking on our brand new teenager Anaya's ever-closed door or reading Story of a Soul with our big-hearted seven year old Zelie; or going on long walks with my son Søren who is teaching me medieval history and trying to finish War and Peace before I can get there first; when not balancing the Wiseblood budget late at night with my wife Brittney (or even better, making an escape to the local co-op, where we can leave the budget behind and finish our sentences without interruption): I spent many of my waking and working hours teaching an invigorating seminar on Dostoevsky, graduate fiction workshops, the Art and Metaphysics of Fiction, and making ready for a 2024 course on the Catholic Imagination in Modern American Literature for the MFA at the University of St. Thomas, which continues to alter (for better, or worse, you ask?!) the lives of many, and which has been the greatest educational endeavor of my life, thanks to my incredible students, great books, and the steadfast leadership of James Matthew Wilson: with over sixty students in the program, we are preparing for year four of an experiment which has me convinced that while MFA culture is too often a flashy bubble over so much bankruptcy, the Catholic intellectual and literary traditions can allow the fine arts to flourish and transcend the artificialities of academia. 2024 will also see the publication of my second novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, a loose sequel to Infinite Regress, which received a once-in-a-lifetime review, alongside Katy Carl's As Earth Without Water (Wiseblood 2021), in The Los Angeles Review of Books. I threw in my two cents on Jon Fosse, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize, and discussed J. M. Coetzee’s latest inversion of Dante on a panel with Paul Pastor, Jane Scharl, and James Matthew Wilson at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. Did I mention that I had a stroke in July and was operating at a bit over half-capacity for much of the year? Likely then I failed to also announce some major news for Wiseblood Books:
In 2023, Mary Finnegan came aboard as our first ever Deputy Editor. She is the best manager and most devoted employee that the press has ever had. Through Mary’s presence, Wiseblood has experienced a much-needed organizational reconfiguration, and the new systems and processes she has put in place have already yielded good things for the future of the press. Armed with well-earned literary chops (and a cup or seven of Barry's Irish Tea), Mary comes to us with a practical background as a nurse in the operating room, and she is able to bring to bear the skills she learned there to her work in the hurly-burly of making books. She is able to look at the bigger picture without sacrificing the smallest iotas, and she weighs the worth of mortal words on the scales of first and last things. Her miraculous combination of efficacious action and depth of vision bode very well for what Wiseblood will become in the years not yet written.
Our books would have been dead on arrival without the longstanding typesetting of Louis Maltese, who will leave the press in early 2024 to care for a growing house of foster children. We send heartfelt thanks to Louis, whose loyal, multi-faceted work saw the press through for over seven years! We are grateful to be working with some remarkable typesetters such as Terrence Chouinard, and we continue to receive indispensable editorial assistance from Kate Weaver and Janille Stephens, John Gray, Katherine Simmerer, and Kathy West. Last in the list, but, of course, not least, Brittney Hren, ever our architect of thoughtfulness and order, kept our books coming to your doors. Our sales this past year were nearly double those of 2022, and 2024 should see even more hopeful signs that our books are finding their ways to many, many more eager readers.
We remain ready for another year of books! But we rely on your monetary support, which underwrites our resolute devotion to publishing old and new books that wrestle us from the ruse of distraction; find redemption in uncanny places and people; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as “political animals”; and render well this world’s sufferings without forfeiting hope—all of this with an unflinching gaze, wide-eyed.
Our tireless labors are a small price to pay, given so many yields. But to keep bringing counter, original, spare, and strange books into being we need your gracious giving. At the end of the year, all nonprofits are asking for donations, and many others merit your monies as much or more than we do. Still, I ask you to please consider making a tax-deductible Donation of Constantine, or offering even a Widow’s Mite, HERE. Without your generous help, Wiseblood Books would cease to exist. In a single month we surpassed our original fundraising goal of $10,000. The days of 2023 are running out, but you can still help us reach this year’s stretch goal of $15,000 to help set in motion the material conditions for ten more years of Wiseblood Books!
With great gratitude,
Joshua
Joshua Hren, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor
Wiseblood Books