This month’s featured titles include a ‘poetic memoir,’ a study of the Gospel of John, and the final mystery from a genre luminary.
“What makes her book especially moving,” Cornell professor Roger Gilber says in a blurb, “is its candid interweaving of the most intimate experiences—medical crises, disability, the challenge of parenting neurodivergent children—with the tale of the minotaur, whom Ahrens boldly recasts as a mother helping to guide her young through and from the maze of her own being.”
In addition to writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and academic essays, Ahrens teaches in Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education.
“Even though it’s been beloved and influential, the Gospel of John has been used to justify violence against Jews and others throughout history.”
As the professor explains, John has been cited to legitimize the burning of synagogues, and is still quoted by white supremacists in support of antisemitic violence. While some Christians focus on its appeals to love one another, others promote its exclusionary elements.
“How does a first-century text come to have such a complex and multivalent history?” Haines-Eitzen asks. “That’s the question I wanted to answer in the book.”
Here, Jane and her husband are settling into new parenthood when some of the enemies she has accrued over a decade of essentially acting as a one-woman witness relocation program conspire to put her family—and former clients—in danger.
“Perry, always a master at ratcheting up tension and delivering high-octane action scenes, showcases all his talents here,” says a review in the New York Times. “Intentionally or not, the novel has a whiff of melancholy. This final Jane Whitefield novel is the farewell his readers needed.”
Read the full story on the Cornellians website.
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