Congratulations Are in Order

I've been a big fan of Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own since reading it on the train up to the Ancestral Home last Christmas, so I was vicariously psyched for the book when it was up for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. And though Elie didn't take that prize home, he has just won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Way to go! Those of you who haven't yet picked up this group portrait of four of 20th-century literary America's most prominent Catholic writers--Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy--have a real discovery ahead of you. For more information from an explicitly Catholic perspective or one not so explicit but perhaps heavily implicit, or a strictly secular point of view, read...well, those reviews, and maybe also Charles Morris from the NYTBR.

(See the rest of the PEN winners.)