God: Stories

by C. Michael Curtis

Overview

In a fresh approach to an age-old discussion, an esteemed editor of the Atlantic Monthly collects twenty-five dazzling short stories by eminent writers about spiritual experiences of all sorts. With works by John Updike, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, and more, God: Stories offers insight, solace, and pleasure not only to the faithful but to seekers — and to those who simply love fine stories. "Challenging the mind and exhilarating the soul . . . [this] rare and precious collection" (Susannah Heschel) explores the human dimensions of spirituality from the comic to the passionate, the skeptical to the mystical and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618387939
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/15/2003
Edition description:	First Mariner Books Edition
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	739,190
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.04(d)

About the Author

C. Micheal Curtis, senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has edited three anthologies: American Stories: Fiction from The Atlantic Monthly, Contempory New England Short Stories, and Contemporary California Short Stories. He lives in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

God: Stories challenges the mind and exhilarates the soul. This is a superb collection of meditations on contemporary religious meaning.

What People are Saying About This

Kathleen Norris

A provocative and delightful tour through the varieties of religious experience.
— Author of Amazing Grace and Closter Walk

Susannah Heschel

Challenges the mind and exhilarates the soul. This is a superb collection of meditations on contemporary religious meaning.
— Author of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

James Carroll

God: Stories is a literary catechism, a true religious education, a fiction lover's book of common prayer.
— Author of An American Requiem

Editorial Reviews

A senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a seasoned anthologizer of fiction, Curtis has chosen 25 stories that directly and indirectly tackle the complex nature of faith and unbelief. Eminent authors--John Updike, Tobias Wolff, Philip Roth, Eudora Welty, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Joyce and Louise Erdrich among them--respond in manifold ways to the range of meanings captured by the word "God." The stories are alternately disturbing, humorous, mystical and pragmatic. Some of the characters, raised in religious conformity, buck against institutional hypocrisy (as in Joe Ashby Porter's "Roof Work"); others, like Brad in Updike's "Made in Heaven," "assumed that religion was already as dead as Marx and Mencken had claimed" but are attracted to believers. Cynthia Ozick's eponymous Rosa experiences both the shame of victimhood and the grace of redemptive kindness. The clergymen who inevitably populate this collection show themselves to be by turns unorthodox, humble, supercilious, corruptible. The unsettling residue left by these stories' many paradoxes invites the reader to intellectual, moral and metaphysical inquiry. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly