Afterlives of the Saints, the new book from Colin Dickey

Colin Dickey's first book, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, was a breath of fresh air in the buttoned-down world of history writing: a bravura account of the oddball obsessives who concocted some crazy -- but dangerously influential -- theories regarding the size and shape of skulls, and who went to almost any ends to acquire certain heads.

His new book, Afterlives of the Saints, Colin Dickey applies his prodigious research skills and penetrating gaze to the stories of some of the earliest and most-unorthodox saints of the Christian church.

Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith

by Colin Dickey

In Afterlives of the Saints, Colin Dickey presents us with a history of faith as told through some of the strangest stories of the early saints. These are saints who murder, saints who gouge out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. These are saints who, when visited in a contemporary context -- as saints in the cities -- actually enlarge our concept of faith.

With a lively intellect and fresh insight, Dickey reveals that we can no longer experience the world as did the saints who once walked amongst us. Today, such ascetics, pushing their bodies to the edges of experience, would be labeled with all manner of clinical diagnoses: masochism, anorexia, schizophrenia. The old pathways to sainthood are clearly incompatible with modern life. In our world, such practices are pathologies.

And yet, these saints have become a creative engine by which we can tap into the rich attraction of excess, while safely observing a kind of superhuman insanity. Colin Dickey retells their stories, not as a theologian, but as someone trying to understand the ways of the world.

About the Author

Colin Dickey is the author of

Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius and Afterlives of

the Saints. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Lapham's Quarterly, Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. He is also co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Once again, Colin Dickey has written a unique book, something that only he could produce. An enthusiastic article in the LA Review of Books captured the appeal of Afterlives perfectly:

"Colin Dickey's Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith offers what to most of us will be an unfamiliar (and thus seductive) litany. These are not the standard, well-behaved saints, the Johns, Jameses, and Josephs. They are instead, as Dickey notes, the miscreants: "saints who murder, saints who [gouge] out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned." Dickey's saints are petulant in their pursuit of spiritual perfection. They steal away, sequester themselves, or expose their suffering for all to see. They are excessive, indecorous, mad, and mostly unable to live in the world. They are, for better or worse, a lot like us."

We hope you'll enjoy reading Afterlives of the Saints, and exploring the tangled paths of history and philosophy that Colin Dickey leads you down.

Sincerely,

Rich

Unbridled Books