Paul Elie in The New York Times

Paul Elie's essay, "Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?", is a must-read.

From The New York Times:

"This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground." 

The Fine Delight--both the website and the forthcoming print volume--is an extended answer to that question. Here's a short response: the complexity and concern is one of definition, a concern endemic to Catholic literature, endemic to Catholic theology and doctrine.

But I am fully thankful that Elie continues to pose this question to wider, often secular, audiences.

Brian Doyle, Andre Dubus, and the Power of No

In this 2008 essay from The Kenyon Review, Brian Doyle muses on the experiences of literary rejection and acceptance, and shares that he was one of the final editors to publish the late Andre Dubus.

"Yes to half of an essay by Andre Dubus, an essay we were cheerfully arguing about when he died of a heart attack, and I asked his oldest son if I could print the good half and not the mediocre half, and he said yes, which made me smile, for I could almost hear Andre cursing at me happily from the afterworld, in that dark amused growly drawly rumble he had when alive."