The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler and Even Deadlier
Pride • Envy • Anger • Sloth • Greed • Gluttony • Lust
Why does it often feel good to do something bad? In a world where we are encouraged to indulge, splurge, live a little—even visit “Sin City”—has the ancient religious concept of sin lost its sway over the moral imagination?
The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler and Even Deadlier, collections of short stories, allow readers to peer into the hidden recesses of sinful thought and behavior. Without moralizing, the authors in these books—Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few—use fiction to explore our all too human thirst for transgressive pleasure.
For readers who know that good and evil isn’t simply a matter of black and white, these collections will provoke lively conversation and sober contemplation. Both titles come with discussion questions for book groups and courses, as well as forewords by Al Gini, which deepen understanding of the seven deadly sins and their place in popular culture today.
Praise for Even Deadlier:
“These fourteen stories by renowned writers, some famous and some not, amount to two stories for each day of the week, two for each of the sins pronounced deadly by Pope Gregory the Great. And what are the wages of reading and contemplating those notorious transgressions? Ah, pleasure! Pleasure without guilt or consequence and then some nonfatal glimmers of wisdom, too. Another excellent collection from the Great Books Foundation.” – Julia Spicher Kasdorf, professor of creative writing, Pennsylvania State University, and author of Eve's Striptease
Praise for The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler:
“Here they are, the deeply human faces of sin. The wonderful sort works of fiction gathered in The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler remind us that most of our problems arise in the hidden recesses of the human heart.” – Ronald M. Green, professor of ethics and human values, Dartmouth College
“It is instructive to hear what some of our greatest literary lights have thought about good and evil, right and wrong, sin and valor. If there are indeed seven deadly sins, this collection will make you think differently about them and about yourself.” – Cathleen Falsani, religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People
From the foreword to The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler:
"The authors in this collection offer us many different ways of thinking about sin. They don’t necessarily present a set of settled opinions on the deadly sins themselves, but they do keep us thinking and imagining what the moral life might be. Socrates put it another way, his student Plato tells us, in words that ring down through the centuries with equal force: The unexamined life is not worth living."
—Al Gini, author of The Importance of Being Lazy and Why It’s Hard to Be Good
Click on the titles below for the table of contents:
Even Deadlier—New! A sequel to The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler
Seven Deadly Sins Slipcase Set—order both volumes in a handsome, illustrated slipcase. A great value!
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