Occasionally my line of work requires that I be in the office most of the weekend. When this happens, I try to take Monday off. My camera had been mostly gathering dust for some time now, while a combination of treacherous sidewalks and overall busyness caused me to neglect going for walks. Today was as good a day as any…
Christopher Adam Posts
“A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors…” Those thoughts from Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia lay some of the foundations of a theological study written in 1972 by Henri Nouwen that encourages Catholic priests and other ministers to reach out to the vulnerable they serve by recognizing their own personal vulnerability. As…
My collection of literary fiction, I Have Demons, is a finalist in the “Books for Adults (fiction)” category of The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. The annual competition is the brainchild of British children’s author Edward Trayer and has, over the past five years, grown to attract hundreds of English-language book submissions each year, from children’s books to adult fiction and…
The Tenth Man, a story written originally in 1944 exploring the consequences of a wartime decimation order, only saw the light of day in 1983, when the unpublished typescript was found by accident in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about its existence, including the author himself, Graham Greene, who was 79 years old at the time…
British novelist Evelyn Waugh was what one might call a traditional Catholic and Catholicism is central to his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Waugh was outright despondent following the liturgical transformations of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and felt as though he was losing the church and faith that he embraced after his…
Standing on the threshold of a new year, I am bidding farewell to 2018 with a selection of photographs I took both at home and abroad. This year I traveled to Saskatchewan, Ohio, Kentucky, Hungary and Portugal. Let’s begin with photos from my trip at the end of May to Saskatchewan, where I was fortunate to visit the historic, late…
Adam is an extremely articulate author, who is flawless with grammar and very easy to read; I absorbed the whole of this trio of tales in one sitting. Set in both rural and urban Canada, the stories are short and relatable slice-of-life snippets, character-based, without any real sense of drama; the basis of the book seems to be a metaphorical…
The rich internal monologues and heavily accented dialogues, giving away the socio-cultural background of these Brooklyn residents, are what make Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream such compelling reading. The fact that all of this dialogue is fully embedded in paragraphs, one sliding into the other, and that it lacks quotation marks (as well as apostrophes), can make…
The Picture of Dorian Gray was Oscar Wilde’s seminal work. And it was also the story which, in the eyes of his scandalized detractors, helped confirm the belief that older gentlemen of influence and financial means, particularly the nobility, often corrupted younger men of lower social standing by making them the targets of their “unnatural” and self-indulgent sexual vices and…
Evelyn Waugh was a master of the English language and of dry, witty writing. He certainly proved as much in his 1948 novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. The novel, based in part on Waugh’s observations during a visit to Hollywood, explores the stuffy pretensions of the British expatriate community in Los Angeles and the cultural divide between Britons and Americans.…