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#5 – Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv – 2022 Best Reads
At the age of 6, Rachel Aviv was hospitalized when she stopped eating and was diagnosed with anorexia. At such a young age, the details of such a diagnosis were lost on the young girl. She explained her situation to herself by saying she had it because “I want to be someone better than me.”… →
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#6 – Fatal by Kimberly Johnson – 2022 Best Reads
I’ve gushed about Kimberly Johnson’s poetry on this blog before. Called Johnson “one of our best living poets.” Noted that she is “the rare poet who consistently evokes for me the presence of the barely-cloaked divine.” Credited her with making me a daily reader of poetry. So when Johnson produced a new collection in 2022,… →
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#7 – Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty – 2022 Best Reads
So much has gone wrong on the Penobscot reservation in rural Maine. Read these fictional short stories by Morgan Talty and it’s hard to get past the poverty and pain along with the sense that the whole place is so marginal as to seem the backside of nowhere. But the place is haunted by things… →
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#8 – Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell – 2022 Best Reads
Katherine Rundell is a scholar but she doesn’t write like one. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Rundell has made a name in children’s books, but with this biography she has brought to life one of the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan Age. And she has done it with a very light touch.… →
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The Wisdom of the Body – Les Carpenter’s Gospel According to Improv
This review appeared on the great Englewood Review of Books site. It is republished here with permission. Is the key to discipleship locked in a book or a body? That’s one of the questions Les Carpenter, an Episcopal parish priest, tackles in his new book The Gospel According to Improv: A Radical Way of Creative and… →
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#9 – A Place Like Mississippi by W. Ralph Eubanks – 2022 Best Reads
At number 9 on the list of Best Reads of 2022 is W. Ralph Eubanks’s beautiful book A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Landscape. Eubanks loves driving through Mississippi, and I do, too. It is a place that has played an outsized role in my understanding of what America means… →
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The Heartlands Best Reads of 2022 – #10 Shaking the Gates of Hell
It’s that time of year! Although Heartlands has been on hiatus, the reading has been ongoing and it’s time to take stock of the year that was in reading. Since its inception in 2016, Heartlands has been offering book reviews based on my eclectic tastes. Each year I comb through the list to choose ten… →
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The Silence of No-One’s Land
I’m back up on the great StreetLight Magazine blog with a new meditation on silence–the way it can wallop you and open you up to something immense. Check it out here: https://streetlightmag.com/2022/11/07/the-silence-of-no-ones-land-by-alex-joyner/ →
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Little Cups
Alex has a new memoir essay up on the great StreetLight magazine website: https://streetlightmag.com/2022/08/01/little-cups-by-alex-joyner/. →
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Whole City Podcast with Elizabeth Catte
Alex Joyner, editor of Heartlands, has a new podcast, The Whole City. You can find the initial episode on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and on YouTube. In this episode, Alex talks with Elizabeth Catte, author of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, about the history and future of Market St. Park in… →
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