The world of historical fiction seems to be alive and thriving in the LDS community, but I’d be interested in seeing the sales figures for all these series. Are they actually selling that well, or are publishers just putting them out in hopes of hitting the same popularity jackpot snagged by The Work and the [...]

Eve’s role in the story of the Fall has been interpreted and re-interpreted. At times labeled villain, at other times celebrated for her wisdom and self-sacrifice, the Mother of All Living remains a sufficiently complex character, inviting, as the human species progresses, reconsideration at nearly every Judeo-Christian cultural turn. Given the recent trend in therapy [...]

OK, so there’s 12 million LDS Church members, 3.5 million speak Spanish and nearly 1 million speak Portuguese — so 1/3 of the LDS books published are in Spanish and nearly 1/10th are in Portuguese, right?

I groaned at the appearance of the first Mormon joke of the movie. A tall man walks up to give a talk and the new counselor has trouble with the podium, making it go up and down ten times before deciding to come up to it and, in an attempt to raise it, rips the [...]

In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard says that when a person asserts his particularity over and against the universal, he sins. In the Old Testament, the prophet Jonah does this and so he sins when God calls him to warn the Ninevehns to repent or be destroyed and he flees the call. In fact, Jonah [...]

In his Times & Seasons post The Metaphysics of Mormon Art, Nate Oman writes:
“Like the medievals we believe in a divine order and a creator god. Yet our god has a different metaphysical relationship to the world. Rather than standing as its ontological ground, he – like us – is an actor in a pre-existing [...]

Released on DVD one week ago today, American Mormon is a short documentary made by Daryn Tufts (Eldon of The Singles Ward) and Jed Knudson (of The Whole Armor of God). Much in the style of Leno’s Jaywalking spots, Tufts goes around asking random people all about the Mormons – what they think of them, [...]

In the discussion about last week’s message on the need for a Mormon market, I pointed out that the Mormon market is ‘undeveloped.’ By that I mean that it lacks the infrastructure needed to effectively deliver products both to those that know they want them and to the rest of the potential audience for Mormon [...]

Time magazine has posted a Jon Heder interview. Heder is, of course, the BYU grad and LDS actor, who starred in the indie-hit “Napolean Dynamite.”
There is one Mormon-related question:
“Is it a challenge to be a Mormon in Hollywood?
“It’s simply about knowing who you are and sticking to what you believe in. Sometimes there’s language issues. [...]

Literary nature writing has a strained reputation among LDS audiences, with some reason. It’s hard to forget that Ed Abbey, the crusty padre of nature writing, gave us the infamous Mormon character Bishop Love in The Monkey Wrench Gang, setting up Love’s vision of unlimited development of the West as being not only representative of [...]

As a follow-up to Eric’s excellent fall preview of Mormon cinema…
Yesterday’s edition of the Salt Lake Tribune featured movie critic Sean Means’s a preview of fall Mormon cinema titles. The article also discusses attempts by Mormon filmmakers to create crossover hits.
Movies discussed include “States of Grace: God’s Army 2,” “Mobsters and Mormons,” “The Work and [...]

LDS Church member Rowan Taylor, officially the most prolific living composer of classical music, died yesterday.

Entertainment Weekly has released its Fall Movie Preview, so I think it’s a good time for a Fall Mormon Movie Preview, especially since a quarter of the lineup will already be out this Friday. Film titles lead to their trailers.
Mobsters and Mormons. Sept. 9.
Written by John Moyer, who wrote three previous Halestorm films (Singles Ward, [...]

Possibly the largest source of new LDS books isn’t showing up in LDS bookstores. Deseret Book doesn’t list them in their on-line store. Nor do they show up at Sam Wellers and Benchmark, stores that specialize in more academic and hard-to-find titles.
However, these new LDS Books do show up on Amazon.com and some other on-line [...]

I’m glad Eric started with the basics in his post on Why Mormon Literature? I agree with his assessment, especially his final point, the need for an audience. The more I work in the world of Mormon books, the more I’m convinced that developing an audience for all the arts is what is necessary to [...]

Thora Rodello Hicken Hunter, one of a handful of Mormon authors who saw national success recounting Mormon life, died August 19 at age 85. Hunter wrote three novels, A House of Many Rooms, Wyoming Wife and Daughter of Zion, all of which were published by national publisher Alfred A. Knopf between 1965 and 1972. During [...]

I frequently hear members of the church explaining that they are not interested in Mormon literature and film because they’re simply not good enough. Why read a Mormon book just because it’s Mormon when you can pick up a New York Times bestseller or a Man Booker Prize winner? Why see a Mormon film in [...]

(Following William’s pattern of switching to obligatory third person)
Patricia has been described as a poet, a novelist, a folklorist, an editor, and a literary critic. Certainly at times she behaves as if she were any and all of these and a few other things besides.
Patricia grew up in the rural Virginia countryside, where she [...]

I am a grad student in English lit. at Boise State University. I previously attended high school in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, spent a couple years playing marbles with the kids in the slums of Florianopolis, Brazil, and then studied English and philosophy at BYU.
Philosophical interests center on the more or less religious existentialists of the [...]