Libby: A Vision of Beauty

By AE Reiff

AE Reiff's Libby is a rare kind of book: part memoir, part spiritual chronicle, part ethnography of a Pennsylvania Mennonite family, and part philosophical meditation on memory, realism, and the theology of dying. Though the ostensible subject is Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young-"Libby"-conversations with her, the work's deeper focus is the author's own inheritance, stretching across nine generations from the 1717 immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania to the present. Through this portrait of a single life Reiff explores the complex matrix of Mennonite tradition, ancestral silence, theological reticence, and the stubborn, unspoken commitments that shape a family and, by extension, a worldview.
The conversations are the soul of the book. They reveal Libby's wit, her biting humor, her distrust of ornament, her lifelong suspicion of romance and sentimentality, and her unspoken longing for things she cannot say directly. Through these dialogues, Reiff becomes not only a nephew but a witness-a role with deep Mennonite echoes, as though the responsibility of "testimony" extends not merely to martyr stories but to the quiet passing of the elderly. The text becomes a contemporary ars moriendi for a plain people.
Readers familiar with Reiff's broader oeuvre will recognize Libby as a crucial interpretive key. The visionary, speculative, and often apocalyptic works-Hapax, Memoir of Angels, Behold the Extraordinary Transfiguration of Ourselves, Alice Under Wonderland, Pennsylvania Fathers-all carry the emotional and metaphysical imprint of this ancestral meditation. The later works' preoccupation with memory, metaphysics, resurrection, and the ontology of the past originates in the spiritual labor performed here. With Libby, the later works reveal a deep continuity between personal ancestry and cosmic imagination.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CJ4F9GR4
• ISBN13: 9781961710085
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Histericks
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"