More on: liminality

They had reasons to believe in God. Miracles helped. And their aftereffects must have lingered for a time, but then, the disciples needed to start walking again, one town to another, nothing in between but the hot, dusty road and a desert of sand and rock where not one thing required a moment’s appreciation. Just…

THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…

The following passages are excerpted from Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, a “non-memoir” by Lauren Winner. © 2012 by Lauren Winner. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.   Middles might be said to be under-theorized. There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of…what…

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay Books, 2011)   Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general…