Tag Archives: Leaps of Faith

We Shall Not Be Moved

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2011

I have to give the American far right an award for chutzpa: somehow they have managed to turn every one of their failures into an attack point. A schizophrenic student buys a glock and turns it on a Congresswoman, a child, and others in a shopping mall? Use this as an argument that we need […]

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Same-Sex Marriage, a Leap of Faith

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2009

Rachel Kranz My novelist friend Rachel Kranz is currently in Maine campaigning with gay friends to save same-sex marriage against attempts to ban it. I mention this because her first novel, Leaps of Faith, is the most intelligent fictional exploration of same-sex marriage that I know. Among the differences between politics and fiction is the […]

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Now for Something Completely Different

By Robin Bates | Published: October 9, 2009

Georgia O’Keefe This past week I seem to have taken as a challenge Elaine Scarry’s observation (in The Body in Pain) that representations of physical pain in literature are rare. Two more I add to the list are the Blake professor in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband, who is dying of cancer, and Rosie, the […]

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Through Novels We Practice Being Human

By Robin Bates | Published: August 26, 2009

    My friend Rachel Kranz and I have been talking and e-mailing about the value of novel reading, always a useful topic to revisit.  Rachel is as thoughtful as anyone I know on the subject—she is a novelist as well as a novel reader so she has a double perspective.  Leaps of Faith (Farrar […]

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