This is Our Exile: Short Stories

This Our Exile brings together short stories preoccupied with the eternal questions—incarnating them afresh through the singularities that mark our secular age. Here is a vibrant contribution to contemporary Catholic fiction that pinpoints those places in the heart that can come into existence only through suffering. “Joshua Hren’s fiction draws upon a great tradition, including Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, but his voice is distinctively his own—elliptical, contemporary, and ironic without cynicism. His characters see the world from within distinctive anxieties whose particulars would have been incomprehensible only a generation ago, but whose nature is nonetheless universal. Marriage is at the center of Hren’s imaginative world: his couples confront each other in an age of self-absorption, addiction, and distraction, within which Hren uncovers the mysteries of birth, death, and responsibility through inner commentary and witty conversation. In the incisive stories of This Our Exile, the profane contemporary world unexpectedly (and without fail) meets up with a religious consciousness in an intersection with some aspect of transcendent reality that it could not have anticipated from within its own horizon. This is deeply thoughtful new fiction, troubling and memorable, offering readers a fresh understanding of what faith and its contraries look like in our times.” GLENN ARBERY President of Wyoming Catholic College, author of Why Literature Matters and Bearings and Distances

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