Tea at Trianon: Wiseblood Books

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Wiseblood Books

There is a new publishing venture dedicated to literary excellence in the footsteps of Flannery O'Connor. To quote:

Wiseblood Books is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope.

We are dedicated to publishing, preserving, and editing fiction, poetry, and philosophy fit for the world stage.

Wiseblood Books is staffed by established editors marked with all the traits of incurable commitments to literature: university-level teaching experience, Doctoral Degrees in English, strong publication records, and over six years experience as freelance, Managing, and Fiction Editors for several literary magazines and major publishers.

Our dock serves as harbor to diverse vessels of literature: minimalist or stream of consciousness; philosophical thriller or epistolary novel; collection of vignettes or thousand-page opus; poetry or political memoirs; journalistic essays or academic scholarship.We seek contemporary fiction in the vein of such popular classics as Dickens' Pickwick Papers, Graham Greene's “entertainments,” Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Cather's O Pioneers!, and P.D. James' The Children of Men or as demanding as Dostoevsky's Demons, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Melville's Moby-Dick, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Our devotion to the life of the mind makes us watchful for works that reach the roots of fundamental questions, that turn to the almost three-thousand-year-long conversations committed to these questions, and that incite our hunger for the splendor of truth.

We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty. We are wide-eyed for epiphanies of truth. (Read more.)

Unknown said...: Readers of Tea at Trianon look twice at Wiseblood Books' latest published Classic, *The Betrothed* by Alessandro Manzoni:

http://www.wisebloodbooks.com/5/post/2013/09/new-wiseblood-classic-returns-to-the-roots-of-faith-in-fiction-with-the-betrothed-by-alessandro-manzoni.html; September 27, 2013 at 12:00:00 AM EDT