ArteFact

Music is an unfolding of time. Indeed, music is an art uniquely suited to the exploration of time. We experience time not as a series of disparate moments, loosely joined together by circumstance, but as a revealing, a gathering of life and knowledge together into an anticipable, symphonic whole. Through the unveiling of their music, composers uniquely speak to the mystery of our being in process, of our being accompanied in the movement toward an ultimate end.

A review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021).

A review of Thom Satterlee's God's Liar.

Most anime offerings are shallow or crass, which makes the good ones stand out all the more. They not only provide magnificent artwork, storytelling and character development; they also give unexpected insights about the human condition, the virtues, and faith. Violet Evergarden, Taichi Ishidate’s quiet and beautifully animated adaption of the steampunk light novel series by Kana Akatsuki, does all of these.

A review of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016).

Daniel Taylor’s three mystery novels—Death Comes for the Deconstructionist (2014), Do We Not Bleed? (2017), and Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees (2020)—are real page-turners. They deliver suspenseful plots, delight by rich allusions, and challenge through thoughtful explorations.

A Review of Tim Winton's The Shepherd's Hut.

By all normal “rules” of the world of television, a sitcom about the afterlife and moral philosophy should not have worked, but it did, not least because the writing is quick, clever, and smarter than most anything I’ve seen.

A Review of Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness.

More often than not, the modern memoir proves to be a survivor’s field notes on the loss and reconstitution of self: a lush, gory, or strident examination of a protagonist’s memories—and an antagonist’s sins. So when we pick up a memoir, we assume we will find these two central characters... The first clue that Ron Hansen’s Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir is something different to this is its borrowed title...