WINNER OF THE 2008 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Selected by Scott Turow Feeling distanced from her friends and family, middle-aged divorcee Caitlin Drury is encouraged by her daughter to express her feelings in a diary, but she is hesitant: I feel lonely she wrote, then crossed it out. She didn't like the idea of someone coming along later to read her journal, finding out she felt lonely. "Like That," and other stories from Anthony Varallo's new collection Out Loud give voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak louder than words. In "The Walkers," we follow a couple on their daily trek through a bedroom community, where they partially glimpse their neighbors' lives, longing for inclusion. Yet their insular lifestyle ensures that they deal with people only on the surface--without learning the truth of their problems. Out Loud tells of longings for meaningful expression and the complexities and escapism of human interactions that keep us from these truths. Varallo uses the trials of youth and remembrances of the past, the rituals and routines of the everyday, the interactions of family, friends, teachers, and neighbors to peel away the layers of language and actions we use to shield ourselves.
The stories in What Did You Do Today? explore the ordinary and the offbeat as if they were one and the same, asking what it’s like to be alive and what makes us human. With warmth, humor, and wonder, these stories suggest that the past is always alive in the present and that even the most fleeting relationships have the power to change us forever. In these short narratives, nothing is negligible, and all experience is transformative. “The stories in this book are like hard little perfect gems. Except when there’re like nice firm chewy gummy candies with something extra inside. Or maybe like zingy spritzery shots of something to drink. Or brain zaps. Or like when your doctor taps your knee just right and you don’t know how they did it. Which I guess means just that this excitingly original work rewards a reader intellectually and emotionally and stylistically, and with humor and pity and sadness all at once. It’s a book I will recommend to my smart reader friends.”—Rebecca Brown, judge and author of The Gifts of the Body and You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe
On the verge of maturity--where parents are distant or absent, friendships are often more accidental than deliberate, and restless angst is common--Anthony Varallo's adolescent protagonists dissect the world, and their place in it, with keen perception. This Day in History deftly collects their moments of discovery. “There's a feeling I get whenever I enter an unfamiliar house, as if a secret inventory has been handed to me, and I am made to understand that the sofa cushions are stained underneath, the coffee table nursing one gimp leg, the books along the bookcase stolen from summer rental, and the dining room table used only for Christmas and taxes,” the narrator confesses in the first of Varallo's twelve stories. Here, a birthday party for an unpopular classmate reveals an adult world both familiar and utterly strange. In subsequent stories a young girl longs to be a part of her best friend's family, only to discover the family is less than ideal; two sisters recall the childhood houses they grew up--and apart--in, places inseparable from each woman's notion of the other; and a mother and son set off on a bold and hopeless errand, their suburban neighborhood momentarily transformed into a stage.As these children stand on the brink of adulthood, unsure how to move forward, striving to make sense of the world around them, they often discover that the distance between themselves and others is no nearly so great as first imagined. Funny, sad, and hopeful, Varallo's stories make a gentle argument for connection and community and, in doing so, seek to extend our sympathy toward the world.
Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four--the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy--in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
The characters in Think of Me and I’ll Know, Anthony Varallo’s probing new collection of stories, face moments in which insight comes too late, or proves insufficient, often to humorous effect. The characters approach the edge of learning something about themselves or about their relationships with other people, only to be left with knowledge that is not particularly useful.Varallo ably captures the often confused and heartrending perspective of adolescents discovering the world, such as in "No One at All," in which an eleven-year-old boy comes to see that another boy, two years older, is something less than a reliable friend. The author also captures the complications of family dynamics, such as the three generations of women in the related stories "Lucky Us" and "Tragic Little Me." The stories in Think of Me and I’ll Know show that we are perhaps not much more comprehensible to ourselves than others are to us.
Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four--the mother, the father, the girl, and the boy--in the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
WINNER OF THE 2008 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Selected by Scott Turow Feeling distanced from her friends and family, middle-aged divorcee Caitlin Drury is encouraged by her daughter to express her feelings in a diary, but she is hesitant: I feel lonely she wrote, then crossed it out. She didn't like the idea of someone coming along later to read her journal, finding out she felt lonely. "Like That," and other stories from Anthony Varallo's new collection Out Loud give voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak louder than words. In "The Walkers," we follow a couple on their daily trek through a bedroom community, where they partially glimpse their neighbors' lives, longing for inclusion. Yet their insular lifestyle ensures that they deal with people only on the surface--without learning the truth of their problems. Out Loud tells of longings for meaningful expression and the complexities and escapism of human interactions that keep us from these truths. Varallo uses the trials of youth and remembrances of the past, the rituals and routines of the everyday, the interactions of family, friends, teachers, and neighbors to peel away the layers of language and actions we use to shield ourselves.
On the verge of maturity--where parents are distant or absent, friendships are often more accidental than deliberate, and restless angst is common--Anthony Varallo's adolescent protagonists dissect the world, and their place in it, with keen perception. This Day in History deftly collects their moments of discovery. “There's a feeling I get whenever I enter an unfamiliar house, as if a secret inventory has been handed to me, and I am made to understand that the sofa cushions are stained underneath, the coffee table nursing one gimp leg, the books along the bookcase stolen from summer rental, and the dining room table used only for Christmas and taxes,” the narrator confesses in the first of Varallo's twelve stories. Here, a birthday party for an unpopular classmate reveals an adult world both familiar and utterly strange. In subsequent stories a young girl longs to be a part of her best friend's family, only to discover the family is less than ideal; two sisters recall the childhood houses they grew up--and apart--in, places inseparable from each woman's notion of the other; and a mother and son set off on a bold and hopeless errand, their suburban neighborhood momentarily transformed into a stage.As these children stand on the brink of adulthood, unsure how to move forward, striving to make sense of the world around them, they often discover that the distance between themselves and others is no nearly so great as first imagined. Funny, sad, and hopeful, Varallo's stories make a gentle argument for connection and community and, in doing so, seek to extend our sympathy toward the world.
The stories in What Did You Do Today? explore the ordinary and the offbeat as if they were one and the same, asking what it’s like to be alive and what makes us human. With warmth, humor, and wonder, these stories suggest that the past is always alive in the present and that even the most fleeting relationships have the power to change us forever. In these short narratives, nothing is negligible, and all experience is transformative. “The stories in this book are like hard little perfect gems. Except when there’re like nice firm chewy gummy candies with something extra inside. Or maybe like zingy spritzery shots of something to drink. Or brain zaps. Or like when your doctor taps your knee just right and you don’t know how they did it. Which I guess means just that this excitingly original work rewards a reader intellectually and emotionally and stylistically, and with humor and pity and sadness all at once. It’s a book I will recommend to my smart reader friends.”—Rebecca Brown, judge and author of The Gifts of the Body and You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe
The characters in Think of Me and I’ll Know, Anthony Varallo’s probing new collection of stories, face moments in which insight comes too late, or proves insufficient, often to humorous effect. The characters approach the edge of learning something about themselves or about their relationships with other people, only to be left with knowledge that is not particularly useful.Varallo ably captures the often confused and heartrending perspective of adolescents discovering the world, such as in "No One at All," in which an eleven-year-old boy comes to see that another boy, two years older, is something less than a reliable friend. The author also captures the complications of family dynamics, such as the three generations of women in the related stories "Lucky Us" and "Tragic Little Me." The stories in Think of Me and I’ll Know show that we are perhaps not much more comprehensible to ourselves than others are to us.
In Feeling Persecuted, Anthony Bale explores the medieval Christian attitude toward Jews, which included a pervasive fear of persecution and an imagined fear of violence enacted against Christians. As a result, Christians retaliated with expulsions, riots, and murders that systematically denied Jews the right to religious freedom and peace. Through close readings of a wide range of sources, Bale exposes the perceived violence enacted by the Jews and how the images of this Christian suffering and persecution were central to medieval ideas of love, community, and home. The images and texts explored by Bale expose a surprising practice of recreational persecution and show that the violence perpetrated against medieval Jews was far from simple anti-Semitism and was in fact a complex part of medieval life and culture. Bale’s comprehensive look at medieval poetry, drama, visual culture, theology, and philosophy makes Feeling Persecuted an important read for anyone interested in the history of Christian-Jewish relations and the impact of this history on modern culture.
Modern scholarship has effectively demonstrated that, far from being a knee-jerk reaction to the challenges of Protestantism, the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fuelled primarily by a desire within the Church to reform its medieval legacy and to re-enthuse its institutions with a sense of religious zeal. In many ways, both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were inspired by the same humanist ideals and though ultimately expressed in different ways, the origins of both movements can be traced back to the patristic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that many contemporaries, and subsequent historians, came to view the Catholic Reformation as an attempt to challenge the Protestants and to cut the ground from beneath their feet. In this new revised edition of Dr Wright's groundbreaking study of the Counter-Reformation, the wide panoply of the Catholic Reformation is spread out and analysed within the political, religious, philosophical, scientific and cultural context of late medieval and early modern Europe. In so doing, this book provides a fascinating guide to the many doctrinal and interrelated social issues involved in the wholesale restructuring of religion that took place both within Western Europe and overseas.
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