What are We Doing Here? - Couverture souple

New essays by the Orange and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson, one of today's most important thinkers - admired by President Obama, and so many others - impels us to action and offers us hope.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize; and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call to continue the tradition of the great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theatre of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still." In our era of rampant political and cultural pessimism, we run the risk of becoming bogged down in disillusionment and of losing sight of ways out of the mire. In What Are We Doing Here?, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson offers us balm: impelling us to action, but offering us hope.

`An intellectual autobiography - a starchy, ardent and, on occasion, surprisingly personal account of what it means to be the custodian of one's conscience in a world saturated with orthodoxies.
In other words, it's a passionate treatment of one of Robinson's longtime preoccupations. A dying reverend instructs his young son in "Gilead," her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel: "The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own not, so to speak, the moustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment." [Here is] a repudiation... of powerful ideologies of any stripe that simplify the world' New York Times

Whether she is investigating the work of great thinkers or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, in these brilliant essays Marilynne Robinson impels us to action and offers hope.

` Hope is to be distinguished "very sharply" from optimism, which is not in abundant supply in these essays. "Hope is loyalty." Robinson urges her audience to stand by what makes us human - "creative, knowing, efficacious, deeply capable of loyalty". The argument is sophisticated and persuasive' Guardian

`Bracing, stringent ... continually challenges' Telegraph