Georges Bernanos and the Writer’s Task
Also: How fake history is made, against the case against travel, Da Vinci in D.C., and more.
One of my favorite imprints is Wiseblood Monographs. Wiseblood is a small, independent publisher in Wisconsin run by Joshua Hren, who is also a founding faculty member of the new MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.
Most of the monographs in the series are short—pamphlets really—but they are handsomely printed on high quality paper and easy to read on the go. I think Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today was the first to be published in the series. Other titles include Rusty Reno’s Duty, the Soul of Beauty, James Matthew Wilson’s The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry, Pierre Manent’s The Tragedy of the Republic, and Georges Bernanos’s Christianity and the Writer’s Task.
The Bernanos volume is a collection of letters and notes that deal with the duty of the writer to challenge—even shock—his readers. Bernanos is the author of The Diary of a Country Priest, among other works, and many of the letters in the volume were written from Brazil, where Bernanos moved with his family from France in 1938. He tried his hand at farming, failed, and returned to France in 1945.
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