Marilynne Robinson and John Calvin

you've probably been asking yourself, what's the deal with that

Welcome to the new subscribers who saw Thursday’s David Lynch post! For the last year, I’ve been doing a series on Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, two of my favorite living writers, for my paid subscribers. So that’s what the deal is here.

As for the very reasonable implicit question “What does this man write about when he isn’t writing about Albert Rosenfield,

The previous thirty posts in this series have covered Marilynne Robinson’s and Annie Dillard’s youth (I, II), some of their first influences (I, II, III, IV), their earliest available work (I, II, III, IV, V, VI), their grad-school theses and dissertations, their first published books for general audiences, and a random uncollected but representative Dillard essay. We’re up to the late 1990s, when Dillard has a novel behind her and yet another prose assemblage, and Robinson has fallen a little too under the spell of America. It doesn’t seem like it, but we’re very close to the end.