What Are We Doing Here?
“Carrington MacDuffie brings her vocal skills and narrative art to this remarkable collection…MacDuffie’s elegant intonation comes through in these challenging and thought-provoking works. Her clear delivery gives shape to the complex arguments…Robinson’s brilliance illuminates this audiobook, and she could have no better narrator than MacDuffie.”
AudioFile
A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Most Exciting New Books of 2018
An Amazon Best Book of the Month in Nonfiction
A BookRiot Pick of Must-Read February New Releases
An Elle Magazine Pick for February 2018
A Millions.com Pick of Most Anticipated February Books
New York Times Pick for Books of the Times
A Midwest Booksellers Association Pick for March
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of New Books We Recommend This Week
An Oprah’s Book Club Selection
An Audiofile Magazine “Best of the Year” Audiobook
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith.
Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."
Praise