Böcker av Joseph Bottum

For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine's Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces--with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum. There's the comic: "Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word." There's the sentimental: "Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden." There's the reminiscent: "Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea." Along the way, there's the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical. "Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art," he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. "Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols," he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays, short stories, and carols gathered in one place--in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine's Press--is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.

"The poetry of Spending the Winter is musical and structured, whimsical and piercing, begging to be read aloud when one is not laughing or arrested by an image that hooks the heart. "Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading," writes one poet. "A throwback to a time when lovers of poetry...looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin," adds another. With sections of comedy that show his wit, translations that echo his vast reading, and formalist poetry that reveal his craft, Bottum aims, in the way few poets these days do, at memorable lines and heart-stopping images as he seeks the deep stuff of human experience: God and birth and death-the beautiful and terrifying finitude of life. "We do with words what little words can do," he writes. But in Spending the Winter, Joseph Bottum shows that words can do far more than a little"--

Ten years ago, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Joseph Bottum took on the overarching problem of the emptiness inherent in so much that passes for music, that white noise we hear everywhere - and was soundly attacked for doing so. In the interim, he has come back to the problem, to dig into the vast riches to be found in forgotten folk ditties, ballads, hymns, and popular tunes, and has sought to revivify them with lyrics worthy of their haunting melodies, which somehow cut to the marrow of the soul. In this, he has succeeded beyond what one would have thought possible, by way of a fierce critical intelligence and a terrific sense of the comedy of errors we call the human condition. Let the music and the lyrics and the brilliance even of his footnotes wash over you, and see what it does for you. My guess is that the hissing sound-bite Muzak of public and private spaces will never sound the same to you again. Without irony, new possibilities - such as poets like Hopkins, the young Pound, and Auden hoped for - will begin to reveal themselves as surely as the fresh dawn rising. - Paul MarianiThe poet and critic Joseph Bottum has managed to produce something genuinely original and quite brilliant: fine new words for good old tunes. His lyrics breathe vitality into some of our most wonderful folk melodies. - Robert P. George, McCormick Professor, Princeton University"Make it new!" advised Ezra Pound. That's exactly what Joseph Bottum has done in this spritely and memorable collection of songs. Looking about American culture today, it's easy to recoil in gloom. But Mr. Bottum reminds us that we look too partially if we see only the meretricious, superficial, and degraded. There is a new current of vitality coursing through American cultural life, a current that is life- and beauty- and joy-affirming. I offer The Second Spring as Exhibit A in the brief for cultural renewal. Here are songs that elevate, enthrall, and ensorcell. Mr. Bottum has reinvigorated a plump score of traditional tunes with lyrics that Make it New indeed. - Roger Kimball, editor and publisher, The New CriterionPrima la parola, dopo la musica, goes the old saying - "First the words, then the music." Or is it the other way around? In any case, they go together like a horse and carriage (words by Sammy Cahn, music by Jimmy Van Heusen). Joseph Bottum has given us bolts of melody, lyrics for tunes old and new. Learn them, sing them - and look forward to this extraordinary writer's next batch. - Jay Nordlinger, National ReviewJoseph Bottum has mixed and shaken three great ingredients to create one of the most stunning publishing events I know of: Twenty-some of the most haunting popular verses of the last four hundred years, given new life in lovely and faithful poems by Bottum himself, and set to (mostly new) music. Sit down at the piano, play them, expand the minds of all who sing along - you will see what I mean. You will tap or stomp your feet, hush, laugh, and shed a tear or two. This is popular music the way it was meant to be, and actually was, before the secular dreck of today's shameless record companies! - Michael Novak, journalist, novelist, and diplomat, and the author of more than twenty-five books on the philosophy and theology of culture.

"The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we no longer "read novels the way we used to." In a historical tour de force--the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contemporary literary criticism--Bottum traces the emergence of the novel from the modern religious formation of the individual soul and the atomized self. Reading everything from Jane Austen to genre fiction, Bottum finds a lack of faith in the ability of art to respond to the deep problems of existence. "The decline of the novel's prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis," he writes. "The novel didn't fail us. We failed the novel." Told in faced-paced, engaging prose, Bottum's The Decline of the Novel is a succinct critique of classic and contemporary fiction--a must read for students of literary form, critics of contemporary art, and general readers who wish to learn, finally, what we all used to know: the deep moral purpose of reading novels." --back cover of book