Please join us in celebrating the release of Angels & Saints (copublished with Christine Burgin) with a special virtual event with Eliot Weinberger and Forrest Gander and hosted by Stephen Sparks at Point Reyes Books (West Coast).

When: December 14, 7pm PST (10pm ET)

Where: Point Reyes Crowdcast

Link: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/weinberger/register

Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.

From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger’s lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife.

Threaded throughout Angels & Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-“concrete” poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.

ELIOT WEINBERGER “one of the world’s greatest essayists” (The New York Times), has been publishing books with New Directions since 1975, most recently The Ghosts of Birds.

FORREST GANDER, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator and writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and United States Artists. His new collection Twice Alive will be published by New Directions in May 2021.