Signposts in a Strange Land: EssaysIn this collection of occasional writings and interviews, Percy discusses the role of the novelist, the moral obligations of Christians, the place of Herman Melville in American letters, and why Southerners regard him so highly. Other topics are the mysteries of language and human nature, and the failure of science and psychiatry to penetrate those mysteries. He also covers the nature of faith, and the prevalence of the second-rate in American life and culture. Throughout the book, his focus is on the South though he says in the mocking self-interview "I'm sick and tired of talking about the South and hearing about the South." |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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An Unpublished Letter to the Times | 349 |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 |
| 425 | |
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Common terms and phrases
American become behavior believe better biological Bourbon called Canticle for Leibowitz Catholic century character Charles Peirce Christian Church course Covington creature culture dyadic Eudora Welty existentialist fact Faulkner feel fellow fiction Flannery O'Connor happened Helen Keller human hundred Jews Kierkegaard language least less literary literature live look Louis L'Amour Louisiana matter mean Melville mind Mississippi Moby-Dick modern moral movie magazine Moviegoer mystery nature Negro never Northern novel novelist one's organism Orleans peculiar Peirce Percy perhaps person poet political possible psychiatrist question reader religion scientific scientism scientists secular seems segregation semiotic sense sentences sexual social society Søren Kierkegaard sort South Southern novelist Southern writer speak Stoic strange surely symbol talking tell Thanatos Syndrome theory things tradition triadic truth unique Walker Percy William Faulkner word wrong