What are We Doing Here?

In our era of rampant political and cultural pessimism, we run the risk of becoming bogged down in disillusionment and losing sight of ways out of the mire. In What Are We Doing Here?, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson offers us balm: impelling us to action, but offering us hope.Robinson's novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila, the Orange Prize -winning +Home and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, celebrate the human spirit. In her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and de Tocqueville inform our political consciousness, or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers: to remake American political and cultural life as 'deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still'.