All books mentioned can of course easily be ordered by using the secure order form page button at the end of this column. Or call. We love hearing from customers and friends.

This edition of BookNotes is one I’m really enthused about. It is inspired by a podcast on which I was a guest.

Let me explain.

Slant Books is a small but important independent publisher of serious literature, poetry, and some theology and philosophy. Slant was founded by Gregory Wolfe — himself an esteemed author and founder of the Image Journal that since 1989 has championed faith-inspired conversations about the arts, aesthetics, and literature; he is also the founding director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing program. The significance of Image (now under other leadership after a season of being captained by James K.A. Smith) is for another day, but Greg has a long history of caring deeply about books and culture. That he would fund and curate a boutique publishing house in the Pacific Northwest, releasing books that make there way even into the cluttered shelves of Hearts & Minds here in Dallastown, PA, is pretty darn cool.

And what a publishing venture it is. Slant, for instance, acquired a book of plays by Rowan Williams (Shakeshaft & Other Plays), released a collection of short stories by the University of Notre Dame English professor Valerie Sayers, offers books by the fascinating Bethel College philosopher (and novelist) Daniel Taylor and a memoir of sorts by the novelist Ron Hansen. And lots of lesser known and debut writers who need to be known.

The official podcast of Slant Books is called Slantcast and, like our own “Three Books from Hearts & Minds”, can be watched on YouTube on their “Slant” channel or listened to, podcast style, wherever you get your podcasts.

I was asked to join a conversation discussing the role of the indie bookstore in the ecosystem of the publishing and book business with two other very smart and passionate bookstore managers. Joining host Gregory Wolfe was Joshua Alan Sturgill representing the legendary Eighth Day Books in Wichita (founded by the late Warren Farha, to whom this podcast conversation was dedicated) and David Kern of Goldberry Books in Concord NC. Both of those cool gents were influenced, even mentored, by Warren and he inspired them both to the vocation of bookselling. It was such a privilege to join this conversation that I wanted to share it with you. You can watch it here, or listen here.

Gregory’s opening few minutes will warm the heart of any bookstore lover. Don’t miss it.

(And don’t miss the announcement at the end from Slant’s brilliant Managing Editor, Emily Kwilinski; what a sharp and pleasant advocate she is to the Slant projects.)

Listening to these guys and their love for books as they discuss the art of principled, indie bookselling is so rich that I wanted you to have a chance to take it in. I tell a bit about our own small business origin story as do the other two colleagues in the indie bookstore world. You might even enjoy sharing it with folks you know who might want a glimpse into what we do.

For what it is worth, each of us are pretty unique (as the most interesting bookstores usually are) each embodying and curating a store with some kind of individual taste and values and priorities. The other two guys have stores that are a bit more sophisticated than our own, it seems, (and, curiously, both of them have a small publishing venture as well.) The conversation really encouraged Beth and me to continue to be ourselves, to continue to offer the sort of bookish vision that (as David put it) indicates something of who we are; our tastes and convictions.

We are so grateful for our customers and appreciate your loyalty to us (we really do) but you should join us in celebrating these other fine, speciality booksellers. I admire them immensely.

Unique, niche bookstores are increasingly a thing, it seems, and we are delighted knowing of new shops opening around the country with focuses on specialities as diverse as kids books, mystery and true crime titles, black studies, travel books, LGBTQ resources, cookbook stores, metaphysical shops. Lots of new stores seem to be opening (even in small towns) but they are often speciality places. Curiously, within the Christian book industry — which is still huge, if less than it used to be — there seems to be fewer theologically sophisticated and literary bookstores; like Eighth Day, say. Too many family owned shops remain in the rather less bookish style of Christian retailers (and are not primarily booksellers.) We give thanks to God for the stores described in this podcast (Eighth Day Books and Goldberry Books.) There are other great Christian bookstores around but we are not at groundswell…

A CAVEAT

I’ll say a quick two-part thing that I wish I could have said in the podcast conversation.

The first thing I should have said is something like this: I do not want to romanticize or overstate the goodness or beauty of all indie publishers, nor demean the big presses and the big authors.There are bad indie publishers and there are great authors on big publishing houses. Most of our very favorite authors are on the medium-sized or bigger houses, actually. And there are bunches of small presses that are just awful.

Further, there are big, corporate types who are very good to work with and are able to offer us discounts and free shipping options and there are smaller presses that are so tight with their own budgets that they make ordering from them nearly impossible. Some establishment, corporate guys are generous and some small businesses are as greedy as the proverbial big business titans.

I loved that Gregory said that he hopes to publish “exquisitely crafted literature that is operating at the highest capacity of the imagination” (and that we can persuade ordinary readers that such fine writing is “not as scary and weird and difficult as they may think.”) Well-done books are a joy to behold and can provide lots of good entertainment so we want to make available really good stuff that is well made, surprising, captivating, aesthetically-rich, and we like championing lesser known authors from smaller presses. But that is not to say that the independent voices are in fact always the best and that the corporate publishers are just churning out cheap stuff. Not at all.

The other booksellers in this conversation are wonderfully interesting and Gregory himself offers fantastic insights; it’s a good conversation which I think you’ll enjoy. I hope you watch or listen and remember that you are part of this story, too. Your support of our family business and your willingness to sometimes buy titles you haven’t heard of shows that you are a real part of the action. You’re keeping books alive in the too-often mindless, digital age. Thank you.

In the spirit of this Slantcast podcast, then, I’d like to tell you about some of the titles in Slant’s catalogue. A month or so ago you may recall I did a list of books by authors who had mostly self-published their books and who each had some connection to us. That self-publishing thing is a whole other topic but they were friends of the store and deserved that shout-out.

But independently owned small or medium sizes presses are often glorious. I think of classic literary outfits like Milkweed Editions or Tin House or Graywolf or (in the faith-oriented space) publishers like Square Halo Books or Plough or UMI (Urban Ministries Inc) or Rabbit Room or Falls City Press or Leonard Sweet’s new Salish Sea Press or Reformed Journal Books, not to mention Eighth Day Press and Goldenberry Books. They are often artful, always fascinating, and worthy of your consideration.

So, a few from Slant that we happily carry. ALL ARE 20% OFF.

Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land Bret Lott (Slant Books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $ 16.00

Bret Lott is not well known enough in our view — he has written mainstream fiction (like Jewel, which was an Oprah Book Club selection) and has had books on the major evangelical publishers. He has written about faith and fiction and he has a book about writing. It isn’t every day that a literary figure from an evangelical background offers a book about peacemaking in the Middle East by way of offering a hopeful look at “the solidarity of sharing a meal.” Lott has lived and taught in Jerusalem and here he offers intimate portraits of “the people, the food, and the hope for peace to be found in a region ravaged by war and conflict.” Faith and food writing and peace? You bet!

These are meditation-like reflections on his journalistic reports of places like a non-kosher butcher shop in a very kosher part of Israel or an olive oil cooperative run by Palestinian and Israeli women. Did you know there is a nighttime harvesting of olives by Bedouins? Have you ever read eloquent prose on a traditional Shabbat dinner? Gather the Olives offers wonderful writing that is what one critic called “a very capricious table.”

Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America’s Lost Landscape Howard Schaap (Slant Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

I gave a quick shout out to this in our conversation at the podcast, telling Greg that we loved this book (Beth stole it from me after I had told her I was in the middle of it, and she finished it before I did.)  The author is a professor at Dordt College and he tells here about his depressed father who lost a farm years ago. The sturdy Dutch Calvinist worldview is often helpful give us a visionary (almost sacramental) orientation to God’s good world but sometimes it ends up stern and insular. Schaap’s upbringing was as violent as Arthur Boer’s (as described in his hard, exquiste Eerdmans book Shattered) but it seemed a touch similar. Schaap becomes a fisherman and finds solace on those waters in the driftless region of mid-America.

What a story this is, bringing to mind that chestnut slogan about the universal in the particular. It is his unique story but, man, it sheds light on so much of what has become of our troubled times. There is “stark beauty and haunting isolation” in growing up in this part of the Upper Midwest, the”lost landscape” of the subtitle. Highly recommended.

God’s Liar: A Novel Thom Satterlee (Slant Books) $15.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

None of us have started this yet, but Beth loved Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and just watched the film version of the novel Hamnet, which she also read) so this may been her list next. It is set in 1665 (during theme of what is called the Restoration) and a blind, politically and religious marginalized write (somewhat associated with Olver Cromwell) appears. His name is John Milton (and he has not yet written paradise Lost) Of course there is the plague and Milton and his wife have fled to the countryside where they are befriend by a local curate.

But it is not just about Milton, but could be said to be about a writer writing about another writer. It is about the power of language and, as Linda Mannheim says, “about being human.”

I greatly appreciate a Christian college literature prof and writer, Paul Willis. Among the many other rave reviews, Willis says:

This deeply satisfying historical novel will keep you reading — and keep you examine your own conscience for the lies, big and small, that we tell. Thom Satterlee’s subtle exploration the memories of a seventeenth-century Anglican minister who came under the influence ofJohn Milton brings to mid the reflective rhythms of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. This is a tale full of surprises, told by an insightful craftsman

Sing Me a Song, She Said: Poems Paul Mariani (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

Mariani is a retired, esteemed English prof (he taught at Boston College) and has published literary biographies (on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.) We very much appreciate his hefty The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity published by Paraclete Press. He has thought a lifetime about literature and poetry and poets and his own poetry volumes have been in our poetry section for decades.

This brand new one, we are told, has as its central section a verse drama about growing up in a fractured family back in the 1950s. “Finally the poet tries to sing a song for his family and especially his mother, long gone, now, who asked him to sing for her all those years ago.” Although he drew up in the tenements of New York’s East Side, these poems about “the erosion of his family on Long Island” and about his many years along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts, sing with a sense of place. The great Ron Hansen says”Paul Mariani’s poetry has always been alert to the sacredness of life and the quiet, abiding presence of Mystery even in the quotidian.”

I do not know if this book, filled with poems of wonder and regret and memory and loss will resonate with young readers; maybe. I am sure it will resonate with me. You, too, perhaps?

Against Certainty: Poems Scott Cairns (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

This brand new collection arrived a few days ago and it seemed like a holy moment. I have only met Cairns a few times and he is a delightful fellow — funny, the assumptions we make about intense poets or those who write about the mysticism of their Orthodox tradition (Scott does both.) I am not sure why I’d assume otherwise, but he is a good, good guy, and a remarkable writer. Slant says that “Against Certainty is the culmination of forty years of literary pilgrimage, resounding evidence that Scott Cairns has produce not only a richly layered body of work but also a poetics that restores the craft to its ancient, enduring purpose.” I suspect he didn’t write that, as he knows the virtues humility. But I can add a hearty Amen to this assessment. You should read anything he does.

The publisher offers this serious exploration of his new work:

What makes words arranged on a page serve as a poem? Over the centuries, poets and critics have spoken of poetry as prospective (as opposed to retrospective), as generating openness, suggestiveness, connotative implication, ambiguity, and-as poet Scott Cairns has said-recognizing the poem as a scene of meaning-making, rather than merely a document of meaning made.

In each of these attempts to name the poetic operation of language, one common disposition obtains: a genuine poem is never finished in its effort to lead a reader into further meaning-making. One might say that the poem is a place-a semantic field-where a recombination of old things can give rise to a new thing.

The poems offered in Against Certainty have been crafted to open up possibilities not only for the reader, but also for the poet himself. As Cairns notes, both the form and the substance of these poems are “the results of my writing to see what I didn’t know to see, to say what I didn’t know to say.” A poem invites the reader to come to terms in order to appreciate them as the approachable terminus of new departure.

Thirst: A Novel A. G. Mojtabai (Slant Books) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

I picked this short book up a few years ago for a few reasons — I mostly like Gregory’s taste and appreciate his brave project publishing literary fiction. And I was curious: years before I read a truly remarkable nonfiction book by this author called Blessed Assurance about the people who work in a plant making nuclear weapons in Amarillo, Texas. The Catholic Bishop there (in the very late 1970s, as I recall) declared that it was a sin to work there. Anyway, I knew the authors name and that part of her writing.

I was also intrigued that the very form of this short novel seemed like a prayer book. And that cover!

Here is how they describe it at the fascinating Slant website:

As A.G. Mojtabai’s Thirst opens, Lena has been summoned to the bedside of her ailing “brother” Theo, an aging country priest who has started to refuse food and drink. What Lena faces is complicated by the fact that she left the faith long ago.

First cousins and closest childhood friends, Theo and Lena were raised in a small Catholic farming community in Texas, named for the village their parents left behind in Germany, a place where all questions—asked and unasked—were answered for all time. The known world was bounded by the iron fence of the parish cemetery containing nearly all their dead. Beyond it, lurked disorder, the dragons of unbelief.

Now faced with the mysteries of mortality and loss, both are struggling to come to terms with the choices that have defined them.

Thirst is a book hard to classify—a novella, certainly, but it is also in part a tone poem, a contemporary book of hours, and a meditation engaging issues of faith and doubt, death and healing.

Roger Rosenblatt has said of A.G. Mojtabai: “It is rare to find a gorgeous stylist and a writer of substance yoked in the same artist. Her work shows heart and unsentimental kindness that leaves the reader enlightened and wiser.”

Miller Cane: A True and Exact History Samuel Ligon (Slant Books) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80 releasing soon

Okay, just when you might be thinking that the literary style of most Slant books is a tad highbrow, aesthete, exceedingly literary (whatever that means) and heavy, I will tell you about this forthcoming novel, a very contemporary read that I finished a few nights ago. It is a wild ride, an unusual book that I may never forget.

The plot is energetic and fun, the wild writing is engaging (except maybe when one of the characters goes on yet another long written rant, which are increasingly unhinged) and the upshot of the story is something that is utterly contemporary and compelling. Among other things it is about school shootings and other civilian massacres.

It isn’t a morose book nor is it disrespectful. But it does have a crazy plot: Miller Cane, a former history teacher, has developed something like a scam offering odd comfort to those who are the victims of massacres; bereaved parents, mostly. He sadly knows something about this first hand, as you will learn. He shows up when there is mass shooting and makes money by offering certain services which may or may not be fully honest or truly helpful. A guy who thinks he and his bereaved wife were not helped by Miller is off the rails and out to expose his scammer worse. So Miller is on the run in his motor home trying to stay one step ahead of this angry stalker with a gun.

Meanwhile, the heart of the story tells of a young girl, Carleen — the precocious daughter of Miller Cane’s former lover, now jailed — who he has taken into his custody at the request of said former lover because her ex — an angry man even worse than that other guy out to get them — is planning to kidnap Carleen who he thinks is his daughter. A will is involved and money is at stake. Miller takes the girl on a exhilarating roadtrip teaching her American history (often about massacres of indigenous peoples, or the various places in Little House on the Prairie) trying to keep her in the dark about both of the men out to find them.

On top of this, Miller is under contract to write side-bars of American villains/heros (or hero/villains) to spice up a high school history textbook that is in the works. His editor is not pleased with his weird essays that make Hunter Thompson’s rants look calm and reasonable. He looks with zeal at the good, the bad, and the ugly of the American psyche (and I was left googling stuff to see if that was even really true or not.) This is weirdo satire at its finest.

Listen to these two reviewers who get it:

Buckle up, gentle reader, Sam Ligon is about to take you on an outrageous road trip across American history and hysteria. It will be tempting to see your fictional guide on this journey, the massacre-counselor and unhinged textbook author Miller Cane, as an unreliable narrator, but it’s the American myth that’s unreliable in Sam Ligon’s razor-sharp satire. Oh, and there’s a chase. And a cat. And it’s hilarious. —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Miller Cane is a jolt of straight-up, adrenalized American greed and violence. Sam Ligon’s prose is an elemental force —fierce and funny, profane and sacred — and his vision of the country’s past and present is as engrossing as it is unsparing. —Shawn Vestal, author of Godforsaken Idaho

The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Novel  Tom Noyes (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

A year ago Beth and I watched a very moving Netflix show about Charles Guiteau who had been in the mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, free-love “Christian” utopian commune. The Oneidians were not the only odd cult in this spiritually ablaze era of American history but it is true that Guiteau — who was the assignee who killed President James Garfield — spent time there. As the plot of Death by Lightning miniseries unfolded, I thought that it surely was based on The Substance of Things Hoped For which is a novel exactly on this utopian community and Guiteau’s odd role there.

Alas, the film-makers did not reference this novel but said it was based on a nonfiction work by Candice Millar called Destiny of the Republic. Well, I knew a bit about this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction plot line because I couldn’t put down the fictional work by Tom Noyes. It has won some acclaim in some circles, but, again, quality works like this ought be better known.

I might have highlighted this novel several years back when I first read it and I suspect that I mentioned that, oddly, author Tom Noyes is, in fact, a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes who founded the Oneida community.

The good folks at Slant described the novel like this:

Joining Noyes and Guiteau in their parallel narratives are a chorus of other characters—family members, lovers, rivals, notable historical figures — whose haunting voices complement, undermine, complicate, and enhance Noyes’s and Guiteau’s versions of events, while also homing in on the novel’s most pressing questions, including those related to revelation, delusion, loyalty, and love.

A Land Without Sin Paula Huston (Slant Books) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

This may be the first Slant release that we championed and I reviewed A Land Without Sin in BookNotes maybe in 2013 or so. We still have some hardbacks and it is a revelation of a book. It is set in Southern Mexico in the 1990s; in those years people knew from the news something about the Zapatista revolution there. It is literary and entertaining, laden with drama and struggle and politics and faith. And the famous Mayan pyramids. Huston has only grown in her reputation as a fine writer over the years (her most recent is The Hermits of Big Sur on Liturgical Press, about a contemplative monastery started in the 1960s at the urging of Thomas Merton.)

I so enjoy the excellent descriptions of the books on the Slant website which captures Slant’s passion for books and their articulate care for their authors. Here’s what they say about A Land Without Sin.

As revolutionary forces gather in the Lacandon jungle of southern Mexico in the fall of 1993, an idealistic American priest vanishes from his post in San Cristobal de Las Casas. The church, immersed in trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the escalating conflict between wealthy landowners and poverty-stricken indigenas, remains strangely silent in the face of his disappearance.

When his sister, only thirty-four but already a hardened battlefield photojournalist, finds out what is going on, she flies to Central America to find him, applying for a job assisting a taciturn Dutch Mayanist in order to provide herself with a cover story. But as it turns out, he, too, is on a secret quest.

From the great pyramids of Tikal to the graceful palaces of Palenque to the shadowy guerrilla camps of the vast Lacandon, A Land Without Sin is a modern-day journey into the heart of darkness.

Huston has said (on a video at the Slant website) that she hopes that readers will come away with “an increased sense of hope” even though this mystery read is mostly about facing the reality of evil even though God is good. Can love win out over evil? That’s one of the biggest question of all, eh?

Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith Jeanne Murray Walker (Slant Books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I don’t know if you know the wonderful poetry of Jeanne Murray Walker or have come across her articles or talks at various literary festivals or faith and the arts events over the years. She is a retired literature prof with an earnest dedicated following; she is so respected and loved by others in her obit, and almost in the circles of Luci Shaw and Madeline L’Engle. Her books works as a memoir but it is also a salute to reading. Anyway, her story is a moving one, a tale about overcoming a strict sort of fundamentalism and embracing the reality that good reading and writing is an open window to the world. Perhaps not as heavy (but as beautiful as) the breakaway in, say, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? or Tara Westerover’s Educated, but if you appreciated those, this is a memoir that will break you open and give you hope. I adored it.

An ode to reading and writing, lurking inside an account of questing faith — or perhaps the other way around. Why read spiritually-minded prose by a poet? Because the poet tells us that Alice Munro’s short stories have been, for her, a means of grace. Because she tells us that reading is a sacrament. That we might “quarry our own lives for images instead of buying. . .ready-made ones.” I feel lucky to be Jeanne Murray Walker’s friend. I feel even luckier to be her reader. — Lauren Winner, author Girl Meets God

Light in the Canyon Darran Cools (Slant Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

Showing their stylistic diversity and love of great writing, again, they just released a YA novel. Yep, a youth book!  I’ve listened to some of it being read by the author at their podcasted book release event. What an intelligent launch with Gregory and Emily and  Darran chatting and him reading. I’ll admit, the discussion was a bit more brainy than I’d expect at a book launch for a kids book, but there it is: these are seroius book lovers and joyfully serious people. And the book, I gather, lives up to their high standards.

I have not read it, yet, but I can say Cools is, well, cool. And even if I distrust publishers who liken their young authors to Madeline L’Engle, but there are some home-made science experiements (“something about black holes”) and Gregory knew her, so if he says it, I’m trusting the suggestion.

They say it is is “by turns chilling, tender, and profound. A story of loss and courage, Light in the Canyon explores how change can help us discover who we’re truly meant to be.”

Booklist is usally a very reliable and respected reviewer of YA books. They write,

Time and the Temple: God and Man Luigi Giussani (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

Greg was first known as the legendary literary leader of Image Journal and now, as distance has grown from his role in that past work, on the strength of his growing reputation as a bone fide indie publisher (and, I hope, from the ripple effect of their fascinating Slantcast podcast as one who continues to the public conversation about books, humanism, and the moral imagination.) Slant is becoming know as a very fine small press, or House as we used to say. They do more than poetry and fiction; they have a number of memoirs and a number of nonfiction pieces.

Time and Temple is one of a handful of books by Giussani published by Slant (alongside one called Living the Liturgy, another on hospitality, one on classical music, and more.) Those who renewal movements within the global Catholic community may know Monsignor Giussani (who died in 2005) as the founder of the Italian lay movement Communion and Liberation which grew into a worldwide movement and Fraternity. This book is a collection of meditations given by Father Giussani in the mid-1990s, two given to Catholic lay communities and the third (“Recognizing Christ”) given to a university group.  Various sermons and talks and chapters have been translated into over twenty different languages so it is a special grace to see Slant in Seattle doing Giussani’s work.

Slant tells us that this book really is a “concise and illumination synthesis of what Fr. Giussani wanted to communicate” — especially to young adults. At the heart of these reflections is the theme of vocation.

There is a bit about discernment in Time and Temple, about paying attention to place and time. Can every moment of life be “an offering”? Can every instant of life be lived for the glory of Christ? Memoir Domini

Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations of Art, Faith, and Mystery Gregory Wolfe (Square Halo Books) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

In my little paragraph above naming some reputable, boutique publishers that are so good these days, I mentioned Square Halo Books. Square Halo published a collection of Gregory Wolfe’s short essays in maybe 2003 or so, a collection of his excellent columns in Image Journal which he then edited and for whom he wrote. They were, if I’m being honest, often my favorite part of the literary journal. Later, Ned Bustard (polishing up his own square halo) edited a bigger, expanded collection and redisgned and reissued it. It is a wonder. If you listened to any of Gregory’s good comments on the podcast, you know how articulate and often charming he is. He is full of insight about things that matter much, and I wanted to highly recommend this good glimpse of his fruitful mind and pen. Support another independent press and buy this fabulous reader from us today. 20% off.