Issue 67

Faith

Spring 2016
,

$20.00

Featuring
Joy Williams / Mohsin Hamid / Louise Erdrich
Description
Editor's Note

Samuel Beckett famously ended his novel The Unnamable “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Why? How? Is it faith that drives us onward? And if so, faith in what? Writers have struggled with this question since the first hominids started scratching symbols into rocks. Do we put our faith in our survival skills or create a pantheon of deities to guide and protect us? By the Twentieth Century, writers like Beckett put their faith in words. In our time of worldwide upheavals and immanent climate catastrophe, our faith in words is under constant assault. Yet writers do go on. For Joy Williams, a selection of micro-fictions from 99 Stories of God (soon to be published by Tin House Books) grapples with many of the same themes of her nearly fifty years of writing—the divine and the uncanny.  Alan Lightman puts his faith in the laws of nature, while Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid contemplates the fraught nature of writing in a country named after faith. Father-and-son authors Jonathan and Adam Wilson discuss their faith in the family seder, the rituals and food that transcend time and space. In his primer on the history of faith, James Carse makes the case for complexity and how not to define religion. We know that there are no simple answers to questions of faith, but our hope is that you are fighting the good fight.

 

A note about the digital versions: If you read on a Kindle, use the Mobipocket edition; for all other e-readers, use the ePub edition.

Print orders ship free by media mail.

Table of Contents

Fiction

Joy Williams
JAIL
DEAREST
AND YOU ARE . . .
GIRAFFE
SEE THAT YOU REMEMBER
NOT HIS BEST
WET
Jamie Quatro
BELIEF
Caoilinn Hughes
SORRY IS THE CHILD
Michael Helm
IN THE MASSIF CENTRAL
Ramona Ausubel
CLUB ZEUS
Daniel Torday
NATE GERTZMAN DRAWS THE INTERNET

Limits of Faith

Mohsin Hamid
Unity, Faith, Discipline
Aimee Bender
Portals
Alan Lightman
Faith in Science
Natalie Diaz
The Hand has Twenty-Seven Bones
Marilynne Robinson
Conversation with the Sacred
Christian Wiman
Not Even Wrong

Poetry

Anne Carson
I WAS THINKING ABOUT HENRY JAMES'S ADVICE TO HIS NEPHEW, BILLY, STRUGGLING TO CLOSE HIS CANVAS BAG FOR THE RETURN JOURNEY FROM LAMB HOUSE, LONDON, TO AMERICA, 1903
Alicia Jo Rabins
CATHEDRAL
WE LEARN TO BE HUMAN
THE VAGINA HEALER
Chuang-Tzu
RAMBLE IN THE VILLAGE OF NOTHINGWHATSOEVER
Translated by Ha Poong Kim

Sarah V. Schweig
The Tower
Maureen N. McLane
R&B
AGAINST THE PROMISE OF A VIEW
James Gendron
from WEIRDE SISTER
Nate Klug
REV. VALENTINE RATHBURN MEETS THE SHAKERS
AUGUSTINE ON TIME
GRACE
Marcus Slease
SACRED SPRING
BAPTISM

Interview

Louise Erdrich
interviewed by Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

Nonfiction

James Carse
HOW NOT TO DEFINE RELIGION
Mira Ptacin
THE IN-BETWEENS
Alex Mar
A WITCH IS A WITCH IS A WITCH
Alexis Knapp
AFTER FORTUNE
Joshua Cohen
DREAM TRANSLATIONS FROM THE EARLY HASIDIC AND ELSEWHERE

Lost & Found

Darcey Steinke
ON FANNY HOWE'S Indivisible
Cheston Knapp
ON HAROLD FREDERIC'S The Damnation of Theron Ware
Leigh Newman
ON JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS'S Sweethearts
Justin Nobel
ON HELMUT TRIBUTSCH'S When the Snakes Awake
Pauls Toutonghi
ON TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S This Blinding Absence of Light

Readable Feast

Adam and Jonathan Wilson
PASSOVER, A CONVERSATION