Editor’s Note
Beyond offering my thanks to the contributors to the current issue, I’d like to inform readers that the editor of The Christendom Review, and my friend, Rick Barnett, has a recently published book up on Amazon entitled Living in the Meantime: Three Novellas, and I'm here to tell you how good it is. There are promotional blurbs from literary eminences like Madison Jones (A Cry of Absence) and Marion Montgomery and our old friend from university days, Sterling Watson (whose novels can also be found at Amazon), the latter writing that what we'll find in these stories "is what we see from the car window if we venture off the interstates into the little places where big lives are still lived, if size is measured by passion."
Oddly enough, I was asked to offer some words of my own:
I had not thought—in the wake of the enormous Southern literary legacy of the 20th century—to have come upon another genuinely new voice from that region, but in this collection of novellas by Rick Barnett I have found one. It is his narrative genius that we can very nearly hear his characters' hearts beat in the very cadence of his prose, and because of this we come to love them all, even the most eccentric among them. I was able to set aside for other distractions not a one of these tales, but, if I might be permitted a note of partiality, I consider "Clemency" a small masterpiece.
I'm perfectly aware that many book blurbs are insincere exercises in obligatory puffery, but I want readers to know that I meant every word. You would do yourself, and possibly our culture, a good service by purchasing the book and, most of all, by taking these stories to heart and spreading the good word about them.
"Clemency" begins: "This is the story of the end of the world in a very small place." And it only gets better from there.
William Luse