The Brunist Day of Wrath Author:Robert Coover The Brunist Day of Wrath, Robert Coover's long-awaited, massive sequel to his award-winning debut, is a committed and committing, awe-inspiring, humbling look at fundamentalisms of all sorts in a world where religion competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason; stranded in their midst is beauty, is art. — The sequel to Robert Coover?s ... more »acclaimed first novel returns to the town of West Condon five years after the bloody conflict at the Brunist church camp. Many continue to cope with the aftereffects of the massacre, but others are receiving new revelations from the lost prophet Giordano Bruno, assembling at the site of the former camp to await the end of days. Exploring the psychologies of over 150 different characters, Coover offers the reader a panoptic view of American hypocrisy and the conviction-centered ideologies that make bloody conflict inevitable.
"Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so . . . " The young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins, candidate for the West Condon Presbyterian ministry, whushing along through the rain-drenched countryside, the bus nosing out of lush farmlands and dark wet forests onto the gently undulant and somewhat barren coal basin that is to be, if his interview goes well, his new home, finds himself meditating upon his church's Great Awakening—a great disaster, as he was taught (he himself is just awaking from a thick early-morning doze, his head fallen against the bus window, muddled dreams of collegial dispute)—and upon the sequence of disruptive church schisms and rationalist heresies that followed upon the Awakening's excessive evangelism through the convulsions of the American nineteenth century, so shaped by Presbyterian thought (and, one might say, confused by it as well), out of which musings he hopes to craft his inaugural sermon, and humming meanwhile that children's hymn of simple faith . . . Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three short story collections, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966.« less