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Blue Walls Falling Down

Blue Walls Falling Down

A Novel

By Joshua Hren

436 pp

$22.95
$22.95
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About the Book

Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. There she meets Peter Clavier (P.C.), a psychologist-activist whose uncle—a pastor—has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. As Stella draws out Peter’s past, the novel follows P.C. 's trajectory from a Cabrini-Green childhood to surreal stardom in the orbit of underwritten radical politics.

When his boss offers Peter a marquee microphone and he moves to D.C., Stella returns home to Milwaukee in search of steady ground. She finds her self-sacrificing father hosting basement meetings that mix nostalgia and conspiracy. In the confluence of comfort and catastrophe, Stella is invited to wager on faith.

Written with a style and sensibility that have been compared to David Foster Wallace and Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Saul Bellow, Blue Walls Falling Down chronicles the eternal questions that agitate our subterranean frequencies and demand more than the human spirit can give or answer alone.



Praise

“A rare bird .  .  . not just a brilliant novel but, in the truest sense, a divine comedy.”

—The Los Angeles Review of Books

 

“We few, we happy few, who follow the world of Catholic fiction like it's a major league championship, welcome a new frontrunner.”

—Australia’s Catholic Weekly

 

“The mending words of Joshua Hren tickle our word-shaped fancy and testify to truths eternal.”

—R.R. Reno

 

“What an intense read​!​ The novel keeps asking the reader, ‘How do you live if you're going to die?’ Infinite Regress faces the evils and tragedies of our current cultural moment with prophetic eyes.”

—Jessica Hooten Wilson

 

“Joshua Hren’s unique creative voice—and deep-seeing eyes—offer a probing portrait of America in the twilight of the west.”

—Michael D. O’Brien

 

“The truth is much more complex and messy and, like Shūsaku Endō, Joshua Hren has become a master of depicting the intricacy of the faith and doubt that plague the human heart.”

—Catholic World Report

 

“ . . . the novel’s most canny feature: penetratingly funny satires of the shallowness of contemporary American life. It surpasses C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in its originality, cunning, speed, and penetration into the mystery of evil.”

—The University Bookman

 

“ . . . a stunning combination of alliterative verse and a Joycean stream of consciousness reminiscent of Ulysses.”

—America Magazine

 

“This novel wants those readers who turn to fiction for wisdom as a hermit turns to silent prayer on a mountaintop.”

—The American Conservative



About the Author

JOSHUA HREN is founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA at the University of St. Thomas. He regularly publishes essays and poems in such journals asThe Los Angeles Review of Books and The Hedgehog Review, First Things and America, Commonweal and Public Discourse. Joshua is the author of nine books, includingthe short story collectionsThis Our Exile and In the Wine Press, Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto, and the novel Infinite Regress.

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