"Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and radiantly human."—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home "Through an ardent faith in the written word Susan Stinson is a novelist who translates a mundane world into the most poetic of possibilities."—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones "Wonderfully fuses the historic and the imaginative."—Kenneth Minkema, executive director, Jonathan Edwards Center Jonathan Edwards is considered America's most brilliant theologian. He was also a slave owner. This is the story of the years he spent preaching in eighteenth century Northampton, Massachusetts. In his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards's young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards's wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale. Susan Stinson is the author of three novels and a collection of poetry and lyric essays and was awarded the Lambda Literary Foundation's Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Writer in Residence at Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, she is also an editor and writing coach. *Starred Review* As a Puritan preacher who suspends listeners above the sulfurous fires of hell, Jonathan Edwards commands center stage in this compelling historical novel. With mesmerizing narrative gifts, Stinson exposes readers to the full force of Edwards’ brimstone sermonizing. But she also lets readers hear Edwards’ voice in other registers, giving compassionate reassurance to his troubled wife, extending tender forgiveness to a despairing sinner, reflecting pensively on how God manifests his wisdom in a lowly spider. But the Edwards voice that most readers will find most irresistible is his inner voice, laden with grief at a young daughter’s death, perplexed at his spiritual status as master of a household slave. As readers listen to Edwards’ public and private voices, they hear many other voices, most memorably that of Leah, the family slave who embraces the faith Edwards preaches yet who fears for the soul of a mother traumatized by the depredations of Christian slave traders. Likewise striking is the voice of a troubled cousin who joins with other long-cowed parishioners in rising up against Edwards’ ecclesiastical leadership and turning him out of his pulpit as a tyrant. An impressive chronicle conveying the intense spiritual yearnings that illuminate a colonial world of mud, disease, and fear. --Bryce Christensen Susan Stinson (susanstinson.net) is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree and Martha Moody, and a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Her work has appeared in The Public Humanist, The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Literary Review, and The Women's Review of Books. She has taught at Amherst College, been awarded the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and has received a number of fellowships. An editor and writing coach, she was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Used Book in Good Condition