A woman who grew up in a family without ties to organized religion describes how her university professor father unsuccessfully attempted to become an Episcopalian priest in his sixties, in a spiritual analysis of the concept of a religious calling as based on the author's numerous conversations with her father as well as interviews with members of the clergy and religious scholars. Reprint.

Do You Hear What I Hear?: An Unreligious Writer Investigates Religious Calling

Proctor, Minna

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin??Books

A woman who grew up in a family without ties to organized religion describes how her university professor father unsuccessfully attempted to become an Episcopalian priest in his sixties, in a spiritual analysis of the concept of a religious calling as based on the author's numerous conversations with her father as well as interviews with members of the clergy and religious scholars. 15,000 first printing.

Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father

Leaders & Notable People

Viking Adult

Love in Vain: Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi is the debut short-story collection in English of one of Italy's most distinguished early modern writers. The twenty stories of Love in Vain were selected and translated by Minna Proctor, who received the 1998 PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her then unpublished renderings of Tozzi's fiction. "The investigation of naturalism, of truth," writes Proctor in her biographical introduction, "defined Tozzi's poetics. Impassioned by literature, yet isolated from the mainstream, Tozzi found nothing so fascinating as the unfettered expression of the inner lives of normal people." His work is at once a mixture of subtlety and melodrama, of psychological perception, primitive emotion, and raw physical need, as his plain subjects, yearning for connection and love, forever grasp at the unattainable.

Love in Vain: Selected Stories

Literature & Fiction

Tozzi, Federigo

Short Stories & Anthologies

New Directions

“Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open-hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct. Its timeless subjects―grief, storytelling, the giving up of childish things―are rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read.” ―Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother―who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-seven and died fifteen years later―and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of Proctor’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctor’s own life―shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother. Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live.

Landslide: True Stories

Community & Culture

Catapult

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