Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction

In the tradition of Flannery O'Conner and André Dubus, A Stay of Confusion explores the role that religious belief and literature play in one writer's life. All creative writing is, in the words of Robert Frost, "a stay against confusion." It tries to find a harmony and order that we only fleetingly detect beneath the chaos of everyday life. Religion has also functioned in this way for Ron Hansen, and it shares with literature a reverence for mystery and for using metaphor to communicate …