Product Details
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2019-02-12)
- Language: English
- Paperback: 336 pages
- ISBN-13: 9780771073472
- Item Weight: 306.18 grams
- Dimensions: 7.99 x 5.19 x 0.86 cm
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lila and Gilead returns with a collection of illuminating essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes.
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville informs our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."
About the Author
MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for "her grace and intelligence in writing." In 2013, she was awarded South Korea's Park Kyong-ni Prize for her contribution to international literature. She is the author of Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop for twenty-five years.
