Literature

Recommended

All Content

“What if . . .?” and “How so . . .?” and “I wonder . . .” Mix with LDS Doctrine and Culture to Generate Each Story in The Darkest Abyss | William Morris, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories

“Mormon speculative fiction” must surely be one of the most niche genres available, and William Morris’s new story collection, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, published by BCC Press, is a standout and quirky addition…

The Last Day

“Scott Eccles?” “Yes!” “Please follow me.” Scott Eccles leapt from his seat, straightened his tie, and surreptitiously placed his fists on his hips in the Superman pose, for he had watched a video online that…

A Very Bad Dog Steven L. Peck, Heike’s Void

Among the benefits to reading authors with large, proven oeuvres is trust. We can trust Steven L. Peck. Remember that through the provocations of the opening of his astonishing new release from BCC Press, a…

Sodom and Gomorrah

Listen to the interview about this piece here. Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A man stands naked on the rubber of a checkout counter’s clnveyer belt, face smeared with something red.…

Second Place: Dispatches from Kolob

Listen to the Out Loud audio version of this article here. Listen to the interview about this piece here. Dear President Russell M. Nelson, For centuries, the pope has been addressed as Your Holiness, and they…

Honorable Mention: Butterflies

Trying to get to the nursery proper and all of the blooming plants—bright colors, heady smells, early summer at its best—Mona almost walked past his table. It was one of those fold-­up numbers with foldout…

Vardis Fisher Pioneered Literary Mormon Writing Michael Austin, Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Grappling with LDS Identity Formation: A Review of Recent Young Adult Novels Rosalyn Eves, Beyond the Mapped Stars James Goldberg and Janci Patterson, The Bollywood Lovers’ Club

The Private Investigator

Listen to the podcast version here. The doorbell rang as I hung up the phone, and then I heard my father’s deep, imposing voice fill our entryway. I stood and walked slowly into the unlit…

The New Calling

Podcast version of this piece. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt,…

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

The ten stories that comprise Losing a Bit of Eden sustain Levi Peterson’s position as one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West. Each story is well grounded in a particular time…

Q&A with James Goldberg, Co-founder of Mormon Lit Blitz

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by…

Lucky Wounds

Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…

Sisterhood and the Divine Feminine Twila Newey, Sylvia

Like a mother opening her arms to embrace her children, the span of mountains and trees that look over my childhood home in Salt Lake City extend to the south and cradle also the homes…

LePetit Richards and the Big Dipper Carpet—An Amusement Based on a Reworking of Whittle’s Research Notes

Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…

Review: Delightful Futuristic Mormon Morality Tale Offers Teaching Tool for Progressive Parents Matt Page, Future Day Saints: Welcome to the New Zion

After his death and resurrection on Earth, Jesus Christ traveled to New Zion—a planet in the Kolob star system—and appeared to its six-eyed alien inhabitants, whom he named the Othersheep. He explained to the Othersheep…

Tatau

Uncle Akumu has tattoos. Big, thick pe’a lines shout his ancient Samoan genealogy as they crisscross his thighs. On his arms he carries his own story. There’s Aunty Lani’s name surrounded by vines and pua…

Excerpt from Eleusis: The Long and Winding Road, Translated and introduced by James Goldberg.

Dean Hughes, Muddy: Where Faith and Polygamy Collide Phyllis Barber, The Desert Between Us

Mormon Saga

Lessons in Scriptural Origami James Goldberg. Remember the Revolution.James Goldberg. The First Five Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories

I first discovered James Goldberg when a friend from my mission shared a blog post from the Mormon Midrashim entitled “Explanation, Justification, Sanctification.” In it, the author shares some profound theology with his ten-year-old daughter in a…

As Above, So Below: Mormonism Mattathias Singhin D. J. Butler’s Kaleidoscopic Cosmological Fantasy D. J. Butler. Witchy Eye D. J. Butler. Witchy Winter D. J. Butler. Witchy Kingdom

There are many different ways to construct a fantasy universe. Some are flowers, carefully grown from a single seed. Some are mirrors, with each element corresponding to a specific parallel in our own world for…

The Cunning Man and Fiction of the Mormon Corridor D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey. The Cunning Man

On December 6, 2019, the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah hosted a release party for The Cunning Man. The novel, which has scenes in the city and in the old coal mines nearby…

A Rising Generation: Women in Power in Young Adult Novels Jo Cassidy. Good Girls Stay Quiet Emily King. Before the Broken Star Julie Berry. Lovely War

When Was the Last Time You Read a Romance Novel? Ilima Todd. A Song for the Stars.

In the Garden of Babel

Eldria is a technician on a team that has unlocked the secret to prayer. The learning machine has labored for years. It has uttered prayers both ancient and fresh, rote and random, then monitored weather…

Review: “Is this the Promised End?” Steven L. Peck. The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals.

The Maidservant’s Witness Mette Harrison. The Book of Abish.

An Astonishing String of Stories Steven L. Peck. Tales from Pleasant Grove.

Review: Welcome Additions Karen Kelsay. Of Omens that Flitter. Javen Tanner. The God Mask.

Sonnet: On His Blindness to Autumn

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Articles and Essays in Mormon Studies

Hugh Nibley: A Short Bibliographical Note

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Literature, Mormon Writers, and the Powers That Be

Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant

Vardis Fisher and the Mormons

Beowulf and Nephi: A Literary View of the Book of Mormon

Dialogue 4.3 (Fall 1971): 42–45
It is tempting, of course, to redress the Book’s limited literary impress by recourse to history, sociology, psychology, and demonology. It is tempting to say that a hundred and forty years in the literary marketplace is too limited a test for such a grand design — but entire literary movements, like the pre￾Raphaelites, have come and gone in the same period

Little Did She Realize: Writing for the Mormon Market

Literature in the History of the Church: The Importance of Involvement

The Imagination’s New Beginning: Thoughts on Esthetics and Religion

On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: “Spring” and “Winter” in Prague: Some Thoughts on the Human Spirit

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: An Hour with Milovan Djilas — Heroic Yugoslav Intellectual

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: An Ornithologist’s Rod McKuen: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

A Survey of Current Literature

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

The Rise and Fall of Courage, an Independent RLDS Journal

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/  Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).

Windmill Jousting and Other Madness: Century 2

New Messenger and Advocate

Sunstone

A Wider Sisterhood

BYU Studies, How She Is

Gospel by the Month

A Survey of Current Literature

Insights from the Outside: From a Commentator’s Note Pad

I, Eye, Aye: A Personal Essay on Personal Essays

Literary Dimensions of Mormon Autobiography

The Representation of Reality in Ninteenth Century Mormon Autobiography

Excavating Myself

Three Essays: A Commentary

The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography

Halldor Laxness, the Mormons and the Promised Land

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature: Selected Bibliography of Recent Articles

The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time

Don’t Fence Me In: A Conversation About Mormon Fiction

When the Brightness Seems Most Distant

Bash: Latter Day Plays: Bash by Neil LaBute

Anne Perry’s Tathea: A Preliminary Consideration: Tathea by Anne Perry

Surviving with Hope: Survival Rates by Mary S. Clyde

Heart, Mind, and Soul: The Ethical Foundation of Mormon Letters

Wanderings and Wonderings: Contemporary Autobiographical Theory and the Personal Essay

The Lyric Body of Emma Lou Thayne’s Things Happen

“Easy to be Entreated:” Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent and Christian Communication

Modern Postmodernism: Worlds Without End in Young’s Salvador and Card’s Lost Boy

The Mormon Fiction Mission

Toward a Mormon Criticism: Should We Ask “Is This Mormon Literature?”

Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction

The State of Mormon Literature and Criticism

from Falling Toward Heaven

Sanctuaries

A Good Sign

Wolves

From Three Jacks

Havesu

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Brothers

Saturday Evening, Sunday Afternoon

The Siege of Troy

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here.

The Gilded Door

A Spiritual Awakening Amid a Hippie Faith : Coke Newell, On the Road to Heaven

Marrow: A Review of Richard Dutcher’s Mormon Films

Gazing Into the Face of the Other

Insight Inside

When Your Eternal Companion Has Fangs

Reading the Mormon Gothic

The Widower

Triptych: Plural

At the Cannery

The Education of a Bible Scholar

Richard Golightly: A Novel

The Dream

American Trinity

The Birth of Tragedy

Grandpa’s Hat

Recompense

Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

Hank Toy’s Devil

Sandrine

What It Means

Dark Watch

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Two-Dog Dose

Acute Distress, Intensive Care

Moving On

Vardis Fisher’s Mormon Scars: Mapping the Diaspora in the Testament of Man

Review: The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife Tim Wirkus. City of Brick and Shadow

Review: Mormons Are a Different Country Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife

Spring Hill

“Slippery”

Mormon Lit Blitz Introduction

The Rose Jar

What the Call of the Deep Teaches

The Thirteenth Article of Faith as a Standard for Literature

“What if . . .?” and “How so . . .?” and “I wonder . . .” Mix with LDS Doctrine and Culture to Generate Each Story in The Darkest Abyss | William Morris, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories

“Mormon speculative fiction” must surely be one of the most niche genres available, and William Morris’s new story collection, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, published by BCC Press, is a standout and quirky addition…

The Last Day

“Scott Eccles?” “Yes!” “Please follow me.” Scott Eccles leapt from his seat, straightened his tie, and surreptitiously placed his fists on his hips in the Superman pose, for he had watched a video online that…

A Very Bad Dog Steven L. Peck, Heike’s Void

Among the benefits to reading authors with large, proven oeuvres is trust. We can trust Steven L. Peck. Remember that through the provocations of the opening of his astonishing new release from BCC Press, a…

Sodom and Gomorrah

Listen to the interview about this piece here. Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A man stands naked on the rubber of a checkout counter’s clnveyer belt, face smeared with something red.…

Second Place: Dispatches from Kolob

Listen to the Out Loud audio version of this article here. Listen to the interview about this piece here. Dear President Russell M. Nelson, For centuries, the pope has been addressed as Your Holiness, and they…

Honorable Mention: Butterflies

Trying to get to the nursery proper and all of the blooming plants—bright colors, heady smells, early summer at its best—Mona almost walked past his table. It was one of those fold-­up numbers with foldout…

Vardis Fisher Pioneered Literary Mormon Writing Michael Austin, Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

Grappling with LDS Identity Formation: A Review of Recent Young Adult Novels Rosalyn Eves, Beyond the Mapped Stars James Goldberg and Janci Patterson, The Bollywood Lovers’ Club

The Private Investigator

Listen to the podcast version here. The doorbell rang as I hung up the phone, and then I heard my father’s deep, imposing voice fill our entryway. I stood and walked slowly into the unlit…

The New Calling

Podcast version of this piece. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt,…

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

The ten stories that comprise Losing a Bit of Eden sustain Levi Peterson’s position as one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West. Each story is well grounded in a particular time…

Q&A with James Goldberg, Co-founder of Mormon Lit Blitz

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by…

Lucky Wounds

Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…

Sisterhood and the Divine Feminine Twila Newey, Sylvia

Like a mother opening her arms to embrace her children, the span of mountains and trees that look over my childhood home in Salt Lake City extend to the south and cradle also the homes…

LePetit Richards and the Big Dipper Carpet—An Amusement Based on a Reworking of Whittle’s Research Notes

Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…

Review: Delightful Futuristic Mormon Morality Tale Offers Teaching Tool for Progressive Parents Matt Page, Future Day Saints: Welcome to the New Zion

After his death and resurrection on Earth, Jesus Christ traveled to New Zion—a planet in the Kolob star system—and appeared to its six-eyed alien inhabitants, whom he named the Othersheep. He explained to the Othersheep…

Tatau

Uncle Akumu has tattoos. Big, thick pe’a lines shout his ancient Samoan genealogy as they crisscross his thighs. On his arms he carries his own story. There’s Aunty Lani’s name surrounded by vines and pua…

Excerpt from Eleusis: The Long and Winding Road, Translated and introduced by James Goldberg.

Dean Hughes, Muddy: Where Faith and Polygamy Collide Phyllis Barber, The Desert Between Us

Mormon Saga

Lessons in Scriptural Origami James Goldberg. Remember the Revolution.James Goldberg. The First Five Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories

I first discovered James Goldberg when a friend from my mission shared a blog post from the Mormon Midrashim entitled “Explanation, Justification, Sanctification.” In it, the author shares some profound theology with his ten-year-old daughter in a…

As Above, So Below: Mormonism Mattathias Singhin D. J. Butler’s Kaleidoscopic Cosmological Fantasy D. J. Butler. Witchy Eye D. J. Butler. Witchy Winter D. J. Butler. Witchy Kingdom

There are many different ways to construct a fantasy universe. Some are flowers, carefully grown from a single seed. Some are mirrors, with each element corresponding to a specific parallel in our own world for…

The Cunning Man and Fiction of the Mormon Corridor D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey. The Cunning Man

On December 6, 2019, the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah hosted a release party for The Cunning Man. The novel, which has scenes in the city and in the old coal mines nearby…

A Rising Generation: Women in Power in Young Adult Novels Jo Cassidy. Good Girls Stay Quiet Emily King. Before the Broken Star Julie Berry. Lovely War

When Was the Last Time You Read a Romance Novel? Ilima Todd. A Song for the Stars.

In the Garden of Babel

Eldria is a technician on a team that has unlocked the secret to prayer. The learning machine has labored for years. It has uttered prayers both ancient and fresh, rote and random, then monitored weather…

Review: “Is this the Promised End?” Steven L. Peck. The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals.

The Maidservant’s Witness Mette Harrison. The Book of Abish.

An Astonishing String of Stories Steven L. Peck. Tales from Pleasant Grove.

Review: Welcome Additions Karen Kelsay. Of Omens that Flitter. Javen Tanner. The God Mask.

Sonnet: On His Blindness to Autumn

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Articles and Essays in Mormon Studies

Hugh Nibley: A Short Bibliographical Note

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Literature, Mormon Writers, and the Powers That Be

Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant

Vardis Fisher and the Mormons

Beowulf and Nephi: A Literary View of the Book of Mormon

Dialogue 4.3 (Fall 1971): 42–45
It is tempting, of course, to redress the Book’s limited literary impress by recourse to history, sociology, psychology, and demonology. It is tempting to say that a hundred and forty years in the literary marketplace is too limited a test for such a grand design — but entire literary movements, like the pre￾Raphaelites, have come and gone in the same period

Little Did She Realize: Writing for the Mormon Market

Literature in the History of the Church: The Importance of Involvement

The Imagination’s New Beginning: Thoughts on Esthetics and Religion

On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: “Spring” and “Winter” in Prague: Some Thoughts on the Human Spirit

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: An Hour with Milovan Djilas — Heroic Yugoslav Intellectual

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: An Ornithologist’s Rod McKuen: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

A Survey of Current Literature

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

The Rise and Fall of Courage, an Independent RLDS Journal

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/  Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).

Windmill Jousting and Other Madness: Century 2

New Messenger and Advocate

Sunstone

A Wider Sisterhood

BYU Studies, How She Is

Gospel by the Month

A Survey of Current Literature

Insights from the Outside: From a Commentator’s Note Pad

I, Eye, Aye: A Personal Essay on Personal Essays

Literary Dimensions of Mormon Autobiography

The Representation of Reality in Ninteenth Century Mormon Autobiography

Excavating Myself

Three Essays: A Commentary

The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography

Halldor Laxness, the Mormons and the Promised Land

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature

A Survey of Current Literature: Selected Bibliography of Recent Articles

The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time

Don’t Fence Me In: A Conversation About Mormon Fiction

When the Brightness Seems Most Distant

Bash: Latter Day Plays: Bash by Neil LaBute

Anne Perry’s Tathea: A Preliminary Consideration: Tathea by Anne Perry

Surviving with Hope: Survival Rates by Mary S. Clyde

Heart, Mind, and Soul: The Ethical Foundation of Mormon Letters

Wanderings and Wonderings: Contemporary Autobiographical Theory and the Personal Essay

The Lyric Body of Emma Lou Thayne’s Things Happen

“Easy to be Entreated:” Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent and Christian Communication

Modern Postmodernism: Worlds Without End in Young’s Salvador and Card’s Lost Boy

The Mormon Fiction Mission

Toward a Mormon Criticism: Should We Ask “Is This Mormon Literature?”

Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction

The State of Mormon Literature and Criticism

from Falling Toward Heaven

Sanctuaries

A Good Sign

Wolves

From Three Jacks

Havesu

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Brothers

Saturday Evening, Sunday Afternoon

The Siege of Troy

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Listen to the piece here.

The Gilded Door

A Spiritual Awakening Amid a Hippie Faith : Coke Newell, On the Road to Heaven

Marrow: A Review of Richard Dutcher’s Mormon Films

Gazing Into the Face of the Other

Insight Inside

When Your Eternal Companion Has Fangs

Reading the Mormon Gothic

The Widower

Triptych: Plural

At the Cannery

The Education of a Bible Scholar

Richard Golightly: A Novel

The Dream

American Trinity

The Birth of Tragedy

Grandpa’s Hat

Recompense

Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

Hank Toy’s Devil

Sandrine

What It Means

Dark Watch

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Two-Dog Dose

Acute Distress, Intensive Care

Moving On

Vardis Fisher’s Mormon Scars: Mapping the Diaspora in the Testament of Man

Review: The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife Tim Wirkus. City of Brick and Shadow

Review: Mormons Are a Different Country Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife

Spring Hill

“Slippery”

Mormon Lit Blitz Introduction

The Rose Jar

What the Call of the Deep Teaches

The Thirteenth Article of Faith as a Standard for Literature