Light While There is Light: An American History
May 2026 · New York Review of Books
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208
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About this ebook
A moving, poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive search daliance with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.
This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with ghosts: the moans of the author’s mother. And indeed, Waldrop’s ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.
Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the “right” religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.
It is not only his mother, however, but the author’s brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shady business operations and sham religious institutions.
In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop follows a tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O’Connor as he illuminates, in plain, poetic prose, the fear, madness, and destruction lurking beneath the polished surfaces of the American experience.
This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with ghosts: the moans of the author’s mother. And indeed, Waldrop’s ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.
Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the “right” religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.
It is not only his mother, however, but the author’s brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shady business operations and sham religious institutions.
In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop follows a tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O’Connor as he illuminates, in plain, poetic prose, the fear, madness, and destruction lurking beneath the polished surfaces of the American experience.
About the author
Keith Waldrop (1932–2023) was born in Emporia, Kansas. He published his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Cavalry, in 1968, and won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. In 1961, Waldrop and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, founded Burning Deck, an influential small press that specialized in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. He was a professor of English at Brown University for 43 years.
Ben Lerner is the author of three novels and several collections of poetry, most recently The Lights. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
Ben Lerner is the author of three novels and several collections of poetry, most recently The Lights. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
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