Books

Tells of the founding and subsequent history of Ephrata, a mystical religious community that flourished in eastern Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century. Its leader, Conrad Beissel, a German Pietist who came to America in 1720 seeking spiritual peace and solitude. Settled in Lancaster County, his talents and charisma attracted other German settlers who shared his vision of a community built in the image of apostolic Christianity.

Winner of the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell’s stories a suburban retiree’s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.

Rescher develops a theory that accounts for philosophical disagreement and shows how conflicts root in divergent ‘cognitive values’-values regarding matters such as importance, centrality, and priority. He argues that given the nature of the enterprise, consensus is not a realistic goal, and failure to achieve it is not a defect.

This book examines the strange marriage of convenience, from 1899 to 1939, between the French Catholic church and the ultra-rightist, chauvinist, monarchist, and anti-Semitic organization called the Acton Francaise.

Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a “representative life” of our time.