Chesterton Around the Corner: and other literary distractions

By James Casper

In Chesterton Around the Corner and Other Literary Distractions, novelist James Casper gathers a lifetime's worth of encounters with writers, books, faith, memory-and the peculiar business of putting words on paper and hoping someone, somewhere, might read them.

Chesterton naturally turns up often: smoking a cigar, occupying a pub or a pedestal, provoking an argument, and once leaving behind a barrel-backed chair in which Casper finds himself sitting. But around the next corner may be Chaucer, Graham Greene, H. G. Wells, Tolkien, or Ian Fleming. Priests, bishops, Jesuits and teaching Sisters wander in as well.

These essays move easily between literary criticism and personal memory, between England and Minnesota, between the Catholic Church remembered from childhood and the very different Church of the present. Casper considers sincerity and self-promotion, Vatican II and liturgical Latin, science fiction and Christian belief, the dwindling habit of serious reading, and the sometimes uncomfortable place of the Catholic novelist in a changing world.

Running quietly beneath it all is the story of a writer's own vocation.

Casper remembers a father marked by World War II, a young friendship built around the challenge of writing novels, old manuscripts dug up like soup bones, and the experiences that eventually found their way into his novel Everywhere in Chains. Again and again he returns to a question that concerns more than writers:

What remains when the world that formed us begins to disappear?

The answer may be found in an old book, a remembered conversation, a teacher's admonition, a joke, a story-or simply in the stubborn impulse to keep writing.

By turns funny, provocative, nostalgic and deeply personal, Chesterton Around the Corner is less a book about G. K. Chesterton than a conversation with the writers, people, places and beliefs that continue to turn up around the corners of a life.

And perhaps the last word belongs to the teaching Sister to whom Casper sent stories as a schoolboy, although she never answered. Looking back, he realizes what her silence taught him:

"She taught me to write for the sheer love of it."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1957688076
• ISBN13: 9781957688077
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Farhaven Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"