Peter Manseau

En el oeste de Massachusetts, un joven católico recién egresado de la carrera de Religión busca trabajo, y el único que encuentra es ordenar y clasificar todas las donaciones de obras judías almacenadas en un viejo depósito. Teniendo que ocultar su verdadera fe, el joven hace hallazgos sorprendentes, se involucra con una mujer, un idioma, y una gran mentira que definirá el curso de su destino. Pero el encuentro más importante será su amistad con Itsik Malpesh, un inmigrante ruso nonagenario que clama ser el último poeta Yiddish en América. Entre los libros que organiza, encuentra las memorias de Malpesh escritas en Yiddish en una veintena de libros de contabilidad. El mundo que descubre entre sus páginas lo lleva a traducirlo, y se da cuenta que el camino de ambos se cruza de maneras realmente inesperadas y que el verdadero camino de la fe está lleno de preguntas más que de verdades absolutas.

En Huesos sagrados Peter Manseau emprende un singular viaje que lo llevará de Padua a Goa, de Los Ángeles a Jerusalén, de París a Cachemira, de Sri Lanka a Siria, para comprender en todo su alcance el culto a las reliquias de las principales religiones del mundo. El catolicismo, la iglesia ortodoxa, el islam, el budismo y el hinduismo se hallan aqui explicados a partir de una lengua, de un diente o de un pelo.

The 1950s was a boom time for the Catholic Church in America, with large families of devout members providing at least one son or daughter for a life of religious service. Boston was at the epicenter of this explosion, and Bill Manseau and Mary Doherty -- two eager young parishioners from different towns -- became part of a new breed of clergy, eschewing the comforts of homey parishes and choosing instead to minister to the inner-city poor. Peter Manseaus riveting evocation of his parents parallel childhoods, their similar callings, their experiences in the seminary and convent, and how they met while tending to the homeless of Roxbury during the riot-prone 1960s is a page-turning meditation on the effect that love can have on profound faith. Once married, the Manseaus continued to fight for Father Bills right to serve the church as a priest, and it was into this situation that Peter and his siblings were born and raised to be good Catholics while they witnessed their fathers personal conflict with the churchs hierarchy. A multigenerational tale of spirituality, Vows also charts Peters own calling, one which he tried to deny even as he felt compelled to consider the monastic life, toying with the idea of continuing a family tradition that stretches back over 300 years of Irish and French Catholic priests and nuns. It is also in Peters deft hands that we learn about a culture and a religion that has shaped so much of American life, affected generations of true believers, and withstood great turmoil. Vows is a compelling tale of one familys unshakable faith that to be called is to serve, however high the cost may be.

For fans of Lauren Groff, Maggie OFarrell, and Emma Donoghue, a devastating novel of love, intrigue, and community in a time of sickness that remade the worldFourteenth-century Europe. The Black Death has killed half the known world, andin an isolated convent, a small group of nuns spends their days in work, austerity, and devotion, chanting the Liturgy of the Hours. But their community is threatened. Rumors of heresy and a scandalous Book of Ursula, based on the teachings of the charismatic former abbess and founder of the order, have prompted the male church hierarchy to launch an investigation. The priest assigned to minister to the nuns, Father Francis, who is wracked by guilt for an unspeakable crime committed during the lawless plague years, was no friend of Ursula and cant be counted on to defend the order. Disrespect and rebellion infect some novices, and the youngest among them pines for the bishops chief inquisitor. And Mother John, the convents aging spiritual leader, fears shes losing her mind after experiencing a vision that brings back her own rebellious past.As events unfold over the course of a single day, a blizzard that has swept across Europe will break over the convent, endangering the women there and testing their faith. In this astonishing novel, the author of the award-winning Songs for the Butchers Daughter explores the territory between faith and freedom, and how the horrific events of history shape individual lives.

From Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet comes the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road (Publishers Weekly).If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.The 9th-century sage Lin Chi gave this advice to one of his monks, admonishing him that this Buddha would only be a reflection of his unexamined beliefs and desires. Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet took Lin Chis advice to heart and set out on a car trip around America, looking for Buddhas along the road and the people who meet them: prophets in G-strings dancing to pay the rent, storm chasers hunting for meaning in devastating tornados, gangbangers inking God on their bodies as protection from bullets, cross-dressing terrorist angels looking for a place to sing.Along the way Manseau and Sharlet began to wonder what the traditional scripture they encountered everywherein motels, on billboards, up and down the radio dialwould look like remade for todays world. To find out, they called upon some of todays most intriguing writers to recast books of the Bible by taking them apart, blowing them up with ink and paper.Rick Moody recasts Jonah as a modern-day gay Jewish man living in Queens. A.L. Kennedy meditates on the absurdity of Genesis. In Samuel, April Reynolds visits a man of tremendous vision in Harlem. Peter Trachtenberg unravels the Gordian logic of Job by way of the Borscht Belt. Haven Kimmel dives into Revelation and comes out in a swoon. Woven through these divine books are Manseau and Sharlets dispatches from the road, their Psalms of the people.What emerges from this work of calling is not an attack on any religion, but a many-colored, positively riveting look at the facets of true belief. Together these curious minds tell the strange, funny, sad, and true story of religion in America for the spiritual seeker in all of us: A Heretics Bible.

Itsik Malpesh was born the son of a goose-plucking factory manager during the Russian pogroms - his life saved on the night it began by the young daughter of a kosher slaughterer. Or so he believes Exiled during the war, Itsik eventually finds himself in New York, working as a typesetter and writing poetry to his muse, the butchers daughter, whom he is sure he will never see again. But it is here in New York that Itsik is unexpectedly reunited with his greatest love - and, later, his greatest enemy - with results both serendipitous and tragic. His story is recounted in his memoirs thanks to the most unlikely of translators - a twenty-one-year-old Boston Catholic college student who, in meeting Itsik, has embarked upon a great lie that will define his future and the most extraordinary friendship hell ever know.

Summer, sweltering, 1996. A book warehouse in western Massachusetts. A man at the beginning of his adult life -- and the end of his career rope -- becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most auspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh, a ninetysomething Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces -- twenty-two volumes brimming with adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit -- the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpeshs story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways. Moving from revolutionary Russia to New Yorks Depression-era Lower East Side to millenniums-end Baltimore with drama, adventure, and boisterous, feisty charm to spare, the unpeeling of this friendship is a story of the entire twentieth century. For fans of Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Richard Powers, Amy Bloom, and Lore Segal, this book will amaze at every turn: narrated by two poets (one who doesnt know he is and one who doesnt know he isnt), it is a wise and warm look at the constant surprises and ineluctable ravages of time. Its a book about religion, love, and typesetting -- how one passion can be used to goad and thwart the other -- and most of all, about how faith in the power of words can survive even the death of a language. A novel of faith lost and hope found in translation, Songs for the Butchers Daughter is at once an immigrants epic saga, a love story for the ages, a Yiddish-inflected laughing-through-tears tour of world history for Jews and Gentiles alike, and a testament to Manseaus ambitious genius.

A groundbreaking new look at the story of America. At the heart of the nations spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look. Thomas Jefferson himself collected books on all religions and required that the brand new Library of Congress take his books, since Americans needed to consider the "twenty gods or no god" he famously noted were revered by his neighbors. Looking at the Americans who believed in these gods, Manseau fills in Americas story of itself, from the persecuted "witches" at Salem and who they really were, to the persecuted Buddhists in WWII California, from spirituality and cults in the 60s to the recent presidential election where both candidates were for the first time non-traditional Christians. One Nation, Under Gods shows how much more there is to the history we tell ourselves, right back to the countrys earliest days. Dazzling in its scope and sweep, it is an American history unlike any youve read.