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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG

Brian Doyle

Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike

A playful, deeply moving book of spiritual essays -- for the spiritual and non-spiritual alike -- that excavate the rich seams of examined life and point to the miracles that surround us.
When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.

At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary.

David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to be in short supply, ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG, Doyle and Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.

Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was born in New York and attended the University of Notre Dame. He worked at U.S. Catholic Magazine, Boston College Magazine and, up until his death, was the editor of Portland Magazine. He wrote a number of novels and works of nonfiction, and his essays appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Orion, American Scholar, America Magazine, and many more. He won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the 2017 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, the Oregon Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, among others, and had multiple essays included in Best American Essays.
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Published 2019-12-03 by Little Brown

Comments

Generous, posthumous collection of essays... that have the rhythm of poems and the lyricism of songs. Read more...

If you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle's posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double-underlining other sentences.Doyle was a writer "made of love and song and amusement." Every living thing intrigued him and was worthy of his powerful capacity for study and his equally powerful capacity for celebration. Read more...

The great Ian Frazier said that Brian "wrote more powerfully about faith than anyone his generation. "The peripatetic and contemplative Pico Iyer: "Almost nobody has written with the joy, the galloping energy, the quiet love of conscience and family and what's best in us, the living optimism." ... Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places, and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings. Read more...

The essays in One Long River of Song are truly staggering - as close as stones in our palms, and as vast as the sky. Brian Doyle's voice is full of tender pivots, keen wit, and startling joy, summoning all of us to pay more passionate attention to the world.

A posthumous collection of stunning mystical prose from the award-winning author and editor... Doyle employs the ordinary to catch the reflection of a world that is "still stuffed with astonishments beyond our wildest imagining, which is humbling, and lovely, and maybe the only way we are going to survive ourselves and let everything else alive survive us too." Doyle's prose is so expansive and dripping with visceral detail that even the briefest vignettes are often a wondrous adventure. This brilliant compendium of spiritual musings will resonate with people of any faith - or of none. Read more...

A generous sampling of dazzling essays... a renewed opportunity for more readers to discover the insight and humanity of his work. Readers fortunate enough to discover the many pleasures of Brian Doyle's work here will be grateful for that encounter. Read more...

No one can write like Brian Doyle except Brian Doyle, so this collection is infinitely precious. How is it possible that someone who is no longer living can seem a hundred times more alive than the rest of us? The answer lies in these beautiful pages.