When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Mar 13, 2012 - Literary Collections - 224 pages

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A New York Times Bestseller
A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year
Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author of Gilead

Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, not only as a major American novelist, but also as a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist.

In When I Was a Child I Read Books she returns to and expands upon the themes which have preoccupied her work with renewed vigor.

In "Austerity as Ideology," she tackles the global debt crisis, and the charged political and social political climate in this country that makes finding a solution to our financial troubles so challenging. In "Open Thy Hand Wide" she searches out the deeply embedded role of generosity in Christian faith. And in "When I Was a Child," one of her most personal essays to date, an account of her childhood in Idaho becomes an exploration of individualism and the myth of the American West. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our essential writers.

 

Contents

Preface
Imagination and Community
Austerity as Ideology
Moses and the Origins of American
Was a Child
Moses
Wondrous Love
The Human Spirit and the Good Society
Who Was Oberlin?
Cosmology
Notes
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping (FSG, 1981), Gilead (FSG, 2004), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Home (FSG, 2008), and the nonfiction books, Mother Country (FSG, 1989), The Death of Adam (1998) and Absence of Mind (2010). She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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