It’s always nice to discover a review like this on a Monday morning: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/tale-two-bishops-and-brilliant-saint/

In a round-up review of several books about Augustine and The Confessions, Peter Brown has very nice things to say for the inaugural book in our Lives of Great Religious Books series. Brown says the biography is “another gem of a little book by Garry Wills.”

He continues, writing that “Wills describes brilliantly the manner in which this strange work seeped slowly through literary circles…His book is a passionate plea that we should read Augustine’s strange book as it was first heard, and in the light of the purposes for which it was first written.”

Happily his review dovetails nicely with the purpose of the series which is to examine the history and “life” of major religious texts — tracing generation, interpretation, uses, and misuses over time. We are gearing up for the launch of the next two books in the series — biographies of The Book of Mormon and The I Ching — in April.

Fred Appel, editor of the new religious series, The Lives of Great Religious Books, wrote a piece for The Front Table this week:

“Lives of Great Religious Books” was born in the faculty lounge of the NYU Law School in the early spring of 2005, in a conversation over tea with the eminent Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. I had come to NYU to meet with Margalit, then a visiting scholar in the Law School, to ask him about his current research and writing, and talk more generally about trends in the humanities. This is one of the great privileges and joys of being an acquisitions editor at a distinguished scholarly publishing house: being able to engage smart and imaginative people in conversation on topics that preoccupy them. After talking about his own work – including a book he had begun that we eventually published in 2009 – the topic of conversation turned for some reason to memoirs. Margalit was of the opinion that too many were being published – or more precisely, that too few were worth reading. Then he tossed his head back and said dreamily, “you know what I’d like to read? A biography of an important book – the story of its reception across time. That’s the sort of memoir we need more of.”

Read on…

Tune in to Between the Covers to hear John Miller interview Garry Wills on his new book Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography.

“[Augustine] doesn’t really talk about the things you expect in an autobiography. He doesn’t talk about his sister, his brother. He talks about his mother just briefly, when she dies…He was the court orator for the emperor in Milan. Never mentions his activities there, except to say ‘I was paid to tell lies’…He’s not interested in all that. He’s interested in internal spiritual growth and struggles,” says Wills in this fascinating interview.

Listen to more here and then go pick up this week’s New Statesman to read a terrific excerpt from the book.

Our new series, the Lives of Great Religious Books is based on the idea that books, like people, are born and live fascinating lives worthy of biographical treatment. Now to get truly meta — can we then extend it out to say that series are like books are like people in the same way?

That is one way to look at this Q&A between religion editor Fred Appel and Ruth Braunstein at The Immanent Frame in which Fred reveals how the idea behind the series was actually born of a discussion with Avishai Margalit many years ago in a faculty lounge at NYU Law School.

If we accept that series are like books are like people — perhaps this closing paragraph in which Fred reveals his “wish list” of future biographical subjects can be viewed as the series version of a personal ad (“Established series seeks unattached authors for fun and stimulating conversation, must like dogs.“).

I would love to commission an accessible, lively biography of the Daodejing, and I’m also looking for a biography of the Talmud. I’ve been talking to one or two people about that. It is a tremendously important book in the Jewish tradition, and one that has had a fascinating history, not just within Jewish communities in Europe, in the Sephardic world, and in this country, but also in the Christian and Islamic worlds. I would love to commission a biography of Exodus as well. The liberationist story has been so very important. Michael Walzer, as I mentioned, wrote an important book about Exodus from the perspective of political theory and the history of political thought, but I think it’s time for a new book, and perhaps one written from a different perspective. The Koran is of course something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as well. There are a lot of fine Koranic scholars out there, but the state of that field, or subfield, is such that most people are writing in very specialized modes, for other specialists. So finding someone who can write engagingly and accessibly for the general educated public is something of a challenge. But that’s what keeps me busy, and that’s what makes it fun.

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Publishers Weekly’s Religion Bookline has a great feature about our new book series The Lives of Great Religious Books.

Calling the series ambitious, G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes “If it’s true that a book takes on a life of its own, then each has a life story waiting to be told. So let the telling begin–starting with books that have sought the divine and rocked history, one soul at a time.”

He continues to praise Princeton University Press for aiming “to fill a void on the publishing landscape.”

MacDonald is not the only person praising the ambitiousness of this project. In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s PageView blog last week, Carlin Romano noted:

With three marquee scholar-experts like [Wills, Marty, and Lopez], it’s clear that Princeton isn’t fooling around, isn’t simply launching a series of low-profile secondary works. Forthcoming volumes are also impressive in conception, including Annping Chin and Jonathan Spence on The Analects of Confucius, and John J. Collins on The Dead Sea Scrolls. Someone up in New Jersey plainly wants to launch a distinctive, powerful genre.

And with that, Romano’s hit the nail on the head. This new series is the brain-child of religion editor Fred Appel who tells me that this series is designed around the idea of exploring why religious books exert such power on culture and history.

“What we need to know—and what a book of reasonable length could realistically impart to us—is how and why countless numbers of our fellows have been inspired, moved, galvanized, driven to despair or ecstasy by religious books,” concludes Appel.

Learn more about the Lives of Great Religious Books series here and become a fan of the series on Facebook to receive updates about current and forthcoming titles and authors in the series.

Our partners in the New York City launch of the Lives of Great Religious Books series, The Immanent Frame, have posted an excerpt from Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography by Garry Wills on their web site.

Please click through and give it a read. Consider joining us for the launch, too. It is open to the public and should be a fascinating conversation about books in general, but more specifically about the role of religious books in culture and history.