This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home

This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004302239

This book explores the author’s award-winning novels while also engaging her non-fiction. As the first book devoted entirely to Robinson and to her diverse contributions to literature and scholarship, This Life, This World familiarizes readers with the major currents in her thought and moves scholarly dialogue into new theoretical directions. An interdisciplinary group, the contributors bring to their subject a diversity of perspectives—Romanticism, ecocriticism, medicine and literature, religion and literature, theology, American Studies, critical race theory, and feminist and gender studies—that reflects the amplitude and fecundity of Robinson’s art and thought. The book begins with an annotated timeline and concludes with a substantive written interview with Robinson wherein she reflects on her work and its reception. A tremendous resource for Robinson enthusiasts and for readers interested in the questions she raises in her fiction and non-fiction.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2015-11-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250060656

"The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience."--

The Death of Adam

The Death of Adam
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2014-03-18
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1466866535

In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of American culture but little read or acknowledged today. A passionate and provocative celebration of ideas, the old arts of civilization, and life's mystery, The Death of Adam is, in the words of Robert D. Richardson, Jr., "a grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book."

What Are We Doing Here?

What Are We Doing Here?
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-02-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0374717788

New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”

This Life, this World

This Life, this World
Author: Jason W. Stevens
Publisher: Dialogue
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789004296633

This volume explores the author's award-winning novels while also engaging her non-fiction. As the first book devoted entirely to Robinson and to her diverse contributions to literature and scholarship. This Life, This World familiarizes readers with the major currents in her thought and moves scholarly dialogue into new theoretical directions. An interdisciplinary group, the contributors bring to their subject a diversity of perspectives - Romanticism, ecocriticism, medicine and literature, religion and literature, theology, American Studies, critical race theory, and feminist and gender studies - that reflects the amplitude and fecundity of Robinson's art and thought. The book beings with an annotated timeline and concludes with a substantive written interview with Robinson wherein she reflects on her work and its reception. A tremendous resource for Robinson enthusiasts and for readers interested in the questions she raises in her fiction and non-fiction. -- from back cover.

Home

Home
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2009-09-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781554681228

Glory Boughton has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with torment and pain. A troubled boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. He is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Reverend Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, beguiling, lovable and wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with John Ames, his godfather and namesake. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is arguably Marilynne Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

Lila (Oprah's Book Club)

Lila (Oprah's Book Club)
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374709084

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award National Book Award Finalist A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security. Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves. Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.

Mother Country

Mother Country
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1429944730

At the time when Robinson wrote this book, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was a government-owned nuclear plant called Sellafield, not far from Wordsworth's cottage in the Lakes District; one child in sixty was dying from leukemia in the village closest to the plant. The central question of this eloquently impassioned book is: How can a country that we persist in calling a welfare state consciously risk the lives of its people for profit. Mother Country is a 1989 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

When I Was A Child I Read Books

When I Was A Child I Read Books
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2012-03-22
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0748129367

From the author of the magnificent, award-winning novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA comes this wonderful, heart-warming collection of essays about reading. 'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama Marilynne Robinson is not only a writer of sharp, subtly moving fiction, but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this luminous collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her bestselling novels: the place literature has in life, the role of faith in modern living, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our best-loved writers.

The Givenness of Things

The Givenness of Things
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0374714312

The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.