Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

Walker Percy

Macmillan, 2000 - Fiction - 428 pages

At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.

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SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND

User Review  - Kirkus

A pungent, revealing collection of lectures, essays, and interviews—some previously published in Harper's, The Georgia Review, etc.—by the late novelist (d. 1990). Percy was a quintessentially ...

Signposts in a strange land

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Eminent physician/novelist Percy ( The Moviegoer ) died in 1990. Accumulated here are many uncollected essays, several seeing publication for the first time, grouped under three headings conceptually ...

Contents

• Why I Live Where I Live: 3
• New Orleans Mon Amour: 10
• The City of the Dead: 23
• Going Back to Georgia: 26
• The Fallen Paradise: 39
• Uncle Will: 53
• Uncle Wills House: 63
• A Better Louisiana: 67
• The American War: 71
• Red White and BlueGray: 77
• Stoicism in the South: 83
• A Southern View: 89
• The Southern Moderate: 94
• Bourbon: 102
• SCIENCE LANGUAGE LITERATURE: 109
• Is a Theory of Man Possible?: 111
• Naming and Being: 130
• Dying Art or New Science?: 139
• NovelWriting in an Apocalyptic Time: 153
• How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being: 168
• From Facts to Fiction: 186
• Physician as Novelist: 191
• Herman Melville: 197
• Diagnosing the Modern Malaise: 204
• Eudora Welty in Jackson: 222
• Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces: 224
• Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz: 227
• A Low Slick: 234
• Accepting the National Book Award for The Moviegoer: 245
• Concerning Love in the Ruins: 247
• The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry: 251
• The Culture Critics: 263
• The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind: 271
• MORALITY AND RELIGION: 293
• Culture the Church and Evangelization: 295
• Why Are You a Catholic?: 304
• A Cranky Novelist Reflects on the Church: 316
• The Failure and the Hope: 326
• A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybody: 340
• Foreword to The New Catholics: 343
• If I Had Five Minutes with the Pope: 346
• An Unpublished Letter to the Times: 349
• Another Message in the Bottle: 352
• The Holiness of the Ordinary: 368
• AN INTERVIEW AND A SELFINTERVIEW: 371
• An Interview with Zoltan AbadiNagy: 373
• Questions They Never Asked Me: 397
• Bibliography and Notes: 425

About the author

Walker Percy wrote several books, many of them bestsellers, and is considered one of the greatest American writers of our time.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays
• Author: Walker Percy
• Editor: Patrick Samway
• Contributor: Patrick Samway
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2000
• ISBN: 0312254199, 9780312254193
• Length: 428 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Literary Collections / Essays