Jessica Hooten Wilson Subscribe

Jessica Hooten Wilson is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at John Brown University. She is the author of three books, including Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky & the Search for Influence and Reading Walker Percy's Novels. Her edited volume, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West will be published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2020.

February 20, 2020|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank

Encountering Dostoevsky

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Monument to Fyodor Dostoevsky at the State Library in Moscow, Russia (i_photos/shutterstock.com).

In Joseph Frank's Lectures, we are taught how to read well, think well, and, as for all grand endeavors, to live with eschatological apprehension.

May 31, 2019|Fyodor Dostoevsky, John F. Desmond, Rene Girard, suicide, Walker Percy

Prophets for Our Age of Suicide

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Every age needs prophets—whether or not they heed their cautions—because prophets stand out of and often against the current.

December 14, 2018|Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, communism, Dante, Soviet Union, The Divine Comedy, The First Circle, Vladimir Solovyov

Solzhenitsyn’s Literary Ascent

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Even a decade after his death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remains one of the most misinterpreted writers of the 20th century.

October 12, 2018|Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, Henry Fielding, James K.A. Smith, Karen Swallow Prior, reading, Shusaku Endo, virtues, Walker Percy

The Virtues of On Reading Well

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).

As our poor usage of words attests, we do not know what “virtuous” means, let alone how to live it, but reading can help.

July 27, 2018|Aristotle, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth S. Amato, eudaimonia, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Pursuit of Happiness and the American Regime, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy

The Truth about Happiness

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Edith Wharton, circa 1901 (alamy.com)

The master storytellers have much to teach us about our natures and about what makes us happy.

June 15, 2018|Anthony Bourdain, anxiety, depression, Kate Spade, suicide, Walker Percy

Living as an Ex-Suicide

by Jessica Hooten Wilson|

Walker Percy in 1980 (Evelyn Hofer/Getty Images).

If we want to understand how someone who "has it all" could commit suicide, Walker Percy remains our best guide.

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Jessica Hooten Wilson Subscribe

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