Angels: what do we really know about them? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? Today’s guest, Eliot Weinberger, has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into his new book, Angels & Saints. And when you’re trying to find out about angels, it’s hard to avoid the topic of saints.

In his book Weinberger offers saints’ lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies - and we’ll hear one of these read by Weinberger, that of Columba of Ireland who died in the year 597.

And our guide to the divine and earthly orders takes things one step farther - a speculation on the Afterlife!

Angels & Saints is published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.

But we’ll begin with politics - as Weinberger has just won the Bremerhaven Citizens' Prize for Literature, given biannually to writers who "set an example against injustice and violence, against hatred and intolerance."

In 2004 in the London Review of Books, Weinberger published his now famous essay, “What I Heard About Iraq,” a montage of facts, sound bites, and testimonies, that were spouted out of the mouths of the agents and cheerleaders of war. This piece launched a career he’s better known for in Europe and Latin America than in the US, that of a commentator highly critical of US politics and foreign policy. We’ll hear a selection from a more recent piece - “Advice to Washington from Ancient China,” also from the London Review of Books, from February of 2018.

We’ll close the show with a backwards glance at the child who is father to the artist and essayist and author of many collections including The Ghosts of Birds, An Elemental Thing, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, and Works on Paper, to name only a handful... all of which are published by New Directions.

GUEST

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, political commentator, translator, and editor. His books of avant-gardist literary essays include Karmic Traces and An Elemental Thing (named by the Village Voice as one of the “20 Best Books of the Year”). His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq—called by the Guardian the one antiwar “classic” of the Iraq war—and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Among his translations of Latin American poetry and prose are the Collected Poems 1957–1987 of Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidbro’s Altazor, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, which received the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. He was born in New York City, where he still lives.

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