Walker Percy

Today we mark the birth of Walker Percy (1916–1990). Born in Birmingham, Percy remained in the South throughout the course of his life (save a short stint in New York City, where he attended medical school at Columbia University).

The eldest of three sons, Percy was orphaned after both of his parents committed suicide within a span of two years. Raised with his brothers by his bachelor cousin (a lawyer and poet), Walker was brought up as an agnostic but converted to Catholicism as an adult, alongside his wife and children.

Percy met Shelby Foote—a neighbor boy down the road—when he was fifteen, and the two remained lifelong fraternal and literary friends, deeply influencing each others' work. Percy credits tuberculosis for introducing him to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, whom he read during his long convalescence and who ultimately influenced him to "explore the dislocation of man in the modern age." He also said: "[Tuberculosis was] the best disease I ever had. If I hadn't had it, I might be a second-rate shrink practicing in Birmingham, at best." 

Percy won the National Book Award for his (probably most famous) novel, The Moviegoer, but his essays are also wonderful. Click the links below to see what we currently have in stock.

from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:

It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you—they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less—but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon. 

from The Moviegoer:

Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book 

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

Message in a Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

The Moviegoer

Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

The Thanatos Syndrome: A Novel

Despondency

Despondency: The Spiritual Teachings of Evagrius of Ponticus on Acedia

by Gabriel Bunge; translated by Anthony P. Gythiel---154 pp. paper $18.00

Acedia, listlessness, despair—whatever the name, this most painful affliction of modern times was well known among the Desert Fathers. In the first half of Despondency, Fr. Gabriel Bunge explores how the fifth-century monk Evagrius diagnoses this complex condition, emphasizing the “working mechanisms of the passions and of their accomplices, the demons.” Evagrius never underestimates his foe (he labels despondency a “conglomerate of all imaginable vices”), yet he is ultimately optimistic about its cure. “Indeed, the medication he prescribes is surprisingly simple…Since despondency is an illness of both the irrational powers of the soul—desire and anger—it is essential to heal both at the root.” Here is cogent, practical advice from a skilled therapist of troubled souls; Bunge provides expert guidance through a welter of patristic terminology, polishing the psychological gems along the way.