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Zusatztext Praise for This Is Why I Came : "Rakow's prose sings at this register of humanistic truth, infused with the sacred power of language and feeling..."— Harvard Divinity Bulletin "These stories, both Old and New, are awash in dread and terror and beautify. They aren't lifeless myths; they are mythic stories once again given flesh and blood"— Commonweal Magazine " This Is Why I Came is a new mode of transportation. It elevates...unnerves and unsettles... And you finally arrive home, tenderly consoled. Glad tidings." Gregory Boyle, author of Tattoos On The Heart "Examine the book thoroughly: it's miraculous."— Christian Century "But the reader starts to see a different kind of faith form, built on her revision of the testaments (particularly the Old, which is more vivid and startlingly rendered than the New). In Bernadette's Bible, man and God are both vulnerable to each other's disappointment, both culpable for their own mistakes. Whether God made man in his image or vice versa begins to seems moot. Either way, we're in the soup together."— Bookslut "Mary Rakow's quite extraordinary book is billed as a novel, but "agnostic gospels" would be more accurate labeling. . . Rakow's feat in these fragments is to blend the gnomic and the prosaic, skepticism and wonder. At the close, the priest doesn't just absolve the woman of sin. "To doubt the God you believe in is to serve him," he tells her. "It's an offering. It's your gift." No faith is required to pay Rakow a similar tribute. Mere mortals can use imaginative jolts like the one she delivers."— The Atlantic "The outlines of the Bible stories are familiar, but their characters are more rounded, more poignant in Rakow's spare but poetic telling. . . These tales, and the dozens others in this short book, are all ultimately human. If we are created in God's image, Rakow seems to say, then this deity must have the same failings we do. How we resolve them — by reaching out to each other or, at the very least, like poor Cain, coming to a greater understanding of ourselves — may be the true moral of all these tales."— The Boston Globe "Rakow's latest novel brims with wildly imagined Bible stories, into which she infused new layers of mystery and mysticism, ambiguity and wonder. In her hands, tales we've heard all our lives achieve the miracle of surprise."— O Magazine "[Rakow has] cast off her academic robe for this delicate work of fiction, which is informed by the most basic human desires and disappointments. ...the Old Testament chapters that open the book feel more imaginative, less constrained by fighting against theological dogma. Rakow moves unpredictably from the simple, stark details of the Sunday School versions we know to her own striking emendations and elaborations....brief as these prose poems are, they're still capable of arresting moments and startling insights ... the novel is tremendously poignant as it follows the life of Joseph, who speaks no words in the Gospels but finds his voice here."—Ron Charles, Washington Post "I did not think it was possible but Mary Rakow has made the 'greatest stories ever told' even better. This is Why I Came is a beautifully wrought book you won't be able to put down"—Reza Aslan, author of No god but God and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth "filled with brief, often poetic recastings of the Old and New Testaments....Rakow thoughtfully offers sensitive and complex readings that are free of moral thundering....An affecting flash–fiction reimagining of the Good Book."— Kirkus " This is Why I Came is made salvific by its searching; rather than confronting the fact of human suffering with assertions of light, the novel voyages further into the darkness of essential mystery. Resistant to crystalline denouement and wary of firm ...
