Sharon Page

#2

Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway---Joyce Carol Oates takes on each of these literary giants in her newest story collection, powerfully and playfully reinventing the stories of the days leading up to their deaths. Unapologetically fictional--but digging deeper psychologically than many true accounts would dare--Oates’s stories offer tantalizingly imagined glimpses into the inner minds of these familiar writers. Through the words of his own “diary,” we watch as Poe succumbs to existential loneliness during a sociological experiment in an isolated lighthouse, stranded for a year with no companion but his faithful dog...Dickinson is brought back to life in an imagined future era, when a husband and wife buy her as a servant-robot/clone, eager for her to write her charming verses while she does the chores...Samuel Clemens (Twain) dotes on his “Angelfish,” a group of young girls aged 10-15 who he insists should call him Grandpa and on whom he lavishes endless gifts...Henry James volunteers in a British hospital during WWI and struggles to overcome his revulsion at the wreckage of the soldiers’ bodies only to discover something new and dangerously beautiful in himself...And in the final story, with Papa Hemingway hunched over a table late at night with a shotgun to his chin, we trace back over his angry, chaotic life, his tumultuous relationship with his father and his wives...Writing in the trademark words and style of each of these authors, Oates has created a dark, lively, and controversial work of ventriloquism that shows us these literary legends in a new and fascinating light.

#3

1986

What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning nearly two thousand years, the book brilliantly demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, sin becomes a debt that must be repaid in order to be redeemed in God's eyes. Anderson shows how this ancient Jewish revolution in thought shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus and eventually led to the development of various penitential disciplines, deeds of charity, and even papal indulgences. In so doing it reveals how these changing notions of sin provided a spur for the Protestant Reformation. Broad in scope while still exceptionally attentive to detail, this ambitious and profound book unveils one of the most seismic shifts that occurred in religious belief and practice, deepening our understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience."- Jacket.