Small Good Things

The talented and thoughtful Casey Cep brings a collection of twentieth-century greats (both sacred and secular) together unexpectedly in a lovely, very different little piece for The Paris Review.

I am thinking of writers like Andre Dubus, a Catholic whose sacraments were always spilling out of the sanctuary and into the world. Take “Out of the Snow,” one of Dubus’s stories featuring LuAnn Acreneaux, the mother who “watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about snow … told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical form that love assumed in this moment.”