"Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables" by David Bentley Hart
Notre Dame Press is proud to announce the upcoming publication of its latest book by award-winning author and theologian, David Bentley Hart. Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables marks a notable departure from Hart’s previous ND Press titles, Theological Territories and You Are Gods, which are both works of academic theology. Prisms, Veils is, by contrast, a work of fiction: short fables, to be exact. In standard Hart fashion, these tales are shot through with deep reflections on humankind and the world, drawing readers into a rich matrix of philosophical and theological insights.
Henry Weinfield remarks: “Hart’s mastery is evident not only in the conception and shape of a given story but in the gorgeous sentences that lead us unerringly to its denouement. Though the veil of mystery he weaves is never entirely lifted, there is at the same time a passion for clarity that, in satisfying us aesthetically, enables us to probe ever more deeply.”
Prisms, Veils offers readers the unique opportunity to experience Hart’s characteristic philosophical perspicacity in a totally new medium. Multiple reviewers have even compared this collection with the work of Jorge Luis Borges.
Norman Finklestein writes: "Written by moonlight with quicksilver ink, these fables (some might call them parables, or simply tales) of David Bentley Hart may remind the reader of Wilde and Stevenson, of Kafka and Borges. They have a luxurious grace and leisurely pace that would satisfy a nineteenth-century aesthete, and yet they are deeply satisfying to an anxious twenty-first century sensibility, which, sometimes in secret, sometimes openly, longs to immerse itself in what we can simply call magical language. Hart is a sorcerer. He is a devotee of Eros. He is an architect of alternate realities. He is a prodigious scholar. But above all, he is a visionary writer of breathtakingly beautiful sentences. Come in, reader. A feast awaits you."
About the author: David Bentley Hart is a writer, religious studies scholar, philosopher, and cultural commentator. He is the author and translator of twenty-three books, including the award-winning You Are Gods.
Prisms, Veils will be released July 1, 2024. For more information, or to request an advance review copy, contact Steffi Marchman, shoffma7@nd.edu, 574-631-4905.