The story of a seemingly unremarkable man who sees the eternal in the temporal, and who has the breadth and depth of language to communicate his insight to us.
“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber.
Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty.
He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man…
The writing evokes a world in which people are respected for thinking long and hard about our relation to God, no matter whether their thoughts lead them to accepted creeds.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after…
Stallings translates Hesiod into accessible, idiomatic English, inviting us into ruminations on how our ordinary works and days can be in the service of higher truth.
'Stallings's new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days - witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant - is not to be missed' TLS, Books of the Year
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 RUNICMAN AWARD
A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings.
Hesiod was the first self-styled 'poet' in western literature, revered by the ancient Greeks. Ostensibly written to chide and educate his lazy brother, Works and Days tells the story of Pandora's jar and humanity's place in a fallen world. Blending the cosmic and the earthy, and mixing myth, lyrical description,…