The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast: New and Selected Stories

by John L'Heureux

Overview

John L'Heureux spent his long, prolific career exploring questions of morality and faith in stories that entertain, surprise, and sometimes disturb; and The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast compiles the enduring stories of a distinctive American writer.

A sweeping posthumous collection wrestles with faith, irony, and the redemptive nature of love.
—Kirkus

A nun crashes her car; an unborn child sings to its mother; a troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment. In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L’Heureux explores head-on life’s biggest questions, and the moments—of joy, doubt, transcendence—that alter the course of life. Compiled as he neared the end of his life, and conceived as the legacy of a life’s work, The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast brims with elegance, humor, and compassion, welcoming both the ordinary and the rapturous. L’Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision—a master of storytelling and the sentence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998267579
Publisher:	A Public Space
Publication date:	12/03/2019
Pages:	456
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John L'Heureux was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He spent seventeen years as a Jesuit priest, after which he worked as an editor at the Atlantic; and for more than thirty years taught American literature and creative writing at Stanford, where he was the longtime director of the writing program. His stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's. He was the author of twenty-three books, including the novels The Beggar's Pawn, The Medici Boy, and The Shrine at Altamira; and the short-story collections Desires and Comedians. He lived with his wife in northern California until his death in 2019.

Hometown:

Stanford, California

Date of Birth:

October 26, 1934

Place of Birth:

South Hadley, Massachusetts

Education:

Graduate degrees in philosophy and English from Boston College and Harvard University

Table of Contents

Mysteries

The Comedian 3

Mutti 17

Witness 29

The Torturer's Assistant 59

The Handmaid 67

A Few Necessary Questions 83

Answered Prayers 95

Marriages

The Anatomy of Bliss 115

Benjamin 131

A Family Affair 153

Nightfall 185

No Strings 193

On Garby Road 213

The Priest's Wife: Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird 231

Doubts

The Rise and Rise of Annie Clark 249

Communion 271

The Long Black Line 293

Departures 313

Clothing 327

A Kind of Happiness 341

The Expert on God 357

Certainties

Roman Ordinary 365

Sins of Thought, Sins of Desire 373

Brief Lives in California 387

Consolations of Philosophy 399

Themselves 407

The Anatomy of Desire 413

Three Short Moments in a Long Life 419

Editorial Reviews

★ 2019-09-15
A sweeping posthumous collection wrestles with faith, irony, and the redemptive nature of love.

In this compilation of new and previously published stories, L'Heureux (The Medici Boy, 2014, etc.) explores the beauty, pain, and grotesque humor of life in the world of an "ironic God." In "Witness," a statistician, professionally trained to measure the relationship between the hypothetical and the real, struggles to rationalize her terrifying new affliction: stigmata, which have appeared on her wrists. In "The Anatomy of Desire," a soldier, skinned alive during a war and finding himself "desperate to possess and be possessed" by another human being, cuts the skin off his lover and wears it as his own only to realize, terribly, after the act is consummated, that "there can be no possession, there is only desire." In "Communion," which takes place during the years of the Vatican II Council, a change-minded young Jesuit finds himself assigned to a stodgy conservative parish where, to his surprise, he is forced to reckon with his deepest loyalties. The sheer creative range of this collection is impressive. It's no surprise that L'Heureux, who was himself a Jesuit priest for 17 years, can render so convincingly the moral and emotional quandaries faced by aspiring priests, drunken priests, idealistic priests, adulterous priests, doubting priests, dead priests, priests who (like L'Heureux) would be poets, and priests who (also like L'Heureux) are abandoning or have abandoned the priesthood—but what's wonderful is that he doesn't stop there: In his relentless drive to capture the ironies and follies and tragedies of life, L'Heureux gives us abused housewives, bullied children, spoiled children, a ritualistically dancing pope, and dozens of characters who, contorted by their feelings or by the world, stumble—accidentally, briefly, and sometimes unconsciously—into versions (or inversions) of epiphany. It is typical of L'Heureux's dark wit that his single most enlightened character may be the eponymous narrator of "The Torturer's Assistant." "The work [of torture] is bad," the assistant admits, "but I do what I can. I give comfort, I give love," and then at night ("even torturers' assistants have a life outside the workplace"), he tucks his kids into bed: "I touch their small bodies gently, gently, because I know what can be done to them. No, mine is not a life I would have chosen in every respect, but whose is?"

Moral tales full of love and irony written by a master.

Kirkus Reviews

L’Heureux’s own expertise is in our sites of afflictive potential.... he lands, with gleeful precision, on death, sex, regret and then death again. But God’s wry grace always comes through at the last.
—Annalisa Quinn, New York Times

A posthumously published collection by beloved local author John L'Heureux, a former Jesuit priest and the longtime director of the Stanford Creative Program, is the book I keep at my bedside. These illuminating stories range from humorous to tragic, each a true gift of compassion and grace.
—Aggie Zivaljevic (Kepler's Books), the Almanac

John L’Heureux’s work is revelatory. In the way of master writers, so much of what he accomplishes on the page seems effortless and organic, divinely inspired. This book will change you, and his voice and his characters will stay with you long after you leave them.
—Jesmyn Ward

Bursting with elegant prose and capturing the deepest yearnings of the human heart, this collection stands as an invaluable testament to John L’Heureux’s life and work.
—David Henry Hwang

The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast is a brilliant collection, a showcase of John L’Heureux’s vast talents. These stories are incisive, sometimes sardonic, always complex and always marked by John L’Heureux’s intense compassion for his characters—and the rest of us.
—Scott Turow

These stories—interweaving the mundane with the profound, tragedy with comedy—are relentless, hilarious, sly, and astonishing. One can find every aspect of life here: ambition and disappointment, franticness and triumph. But these stories are more than just a chronicle of life. At a time when we are increasingly waylaid by the transient and discardable, this collection of a writer’s lifework feels like an essential and heroic act; and restores a true faith in life.
—Yiyun Li

[His] stories embody a strong sense of humor about the vagaries of faith and life and the fragility of human convictions…. He allowed his characters both their comic foibles and their occasional, unexpected moments of grace.
—Deborah Treisman

In reading his work, one can see, feel, the demands he makes on himself for exactitude, essence, emotional honesty, aesthetic freshness, digging deep for the truths of our thoughts and desires and presenting his findings without flinching, even—no, especially—when they challenge our self-conceptions and certainties, and trouble the heart.
—Tobias Wolff

Darkly funny, bittersweet, audacious, tender.
—Joyce Carol Oates

From the Publisher