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The Benedictines
Set near the Maine coast, Rachel May’s taut and probing new work of fiction, The Benedictines, conjures up the spirit of Sara Orne Jewett’s atmospheric landscapes. With prose that will have you turning pages in anticipation, May follows Annie James, a passionate, young artist whose decision to take a job teaching for a Benedictine school brings her deep into her students’ lives and up against the limits of control…and, for Annie, the limits of passion. With generosity and insight, May traces the deep conflicts between the human heart and the rules that heart invents. Like the quiet beauty of Maine, The Benedictines is a book that will stay with you for a long, long time.
Advance Praise:
The Benedictines is a taut, vivid, spellbinding, and gracefully written novel. I was amazed at how much power and beauty can be packed into so few pages. Rachel May is really, really good.
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
Rachel May’s strange and beautiful vision captured me the very first time I read her writing, years ago, when I was the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. We were thrilled to publish her work there, and eagerly awaited more. Her debut novel delivers richly: in The Benedictines, May uses vignettes to render a complex place and people so immediately alive that one can’t help but turn the pages faster and faster. May’s characteristically offbeat, generous humor is a joy, as is her brilliant portrayal of a community navigating vital questions of teaching, belief, and humanity.
—V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage: A Novel
Advance Praise:
The Benedictines is a taut, vivid, spellbinding, and gracefully written novel. I was amazed at how much power and beauty can be packed into so few pages. Rachel May is really, really good.
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
Rachel May’s strange and beautiful vision captured me the very first time I read her writing, years ago, when I was the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. We were thrilled to publish her work there, and eagerly awaited more. Her debut novel delivers richly: in The Benedictines, May uses vignettes to render a complex place and people so immediately alive that one can’t help but turn the pages faster and faster. May’s characteristically offbeat, generous humor is a joy, as is her brilliant portrayal of a community navigating vital questions of teaching, belief, and humanity.
—V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage: A Novel
118 pages, Paperback
Published February 23, 2016
14 people want to read
About the author
Rachel May
6 books10 followersRachel May is the author of An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family & Slavery (Booklist starred review), The Experiments: A Legend in Pictures & Words, a collection of sewn images and fiction, The Benedictines: A Novel, and Quilting with a Modern Slant, a Library Journal & Amazon.com Best Book of 2014. Work has been recently published or is forthcoming in 1913: A Journal of Forms, The Volta, New Delta Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Indiana Review, Sleepingfish, Word for/Word, The Literary Review, EOAGH, and other journals.
She's an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University and has been awarded residencies at the VCCA, The Vermont Studio Center and The Millay Colony.
“With precise stitch and complex patterning, Rachel May pieces together an intricate story of a family, the people that family enslaved, a writer, and a country. With as much lyrical beauty as the quilts themselves, May ties together the myriad ways the treatment of enslaved people is sewn into the fabric of our country. This book gives long-overdue credit to quilt-making and May deserves much credit for stitching this beautiful book together.”
- Nicole Walker, author of Egg, Micrograms, Quench your Thirst with Salt
"In An American Quilt, Rachel May is able to draw out the entire story of southern slavery and northern complicity from a remarkable discovery--a quilt top created in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1830s, and a notebook containing a cache of letters associated with it. From these materials, May weaves an extraordinary account of the families of the quilt makers--a Rhode Island woman descended from slave traders and the slave-holding husband who had brought her South to live. She also is able to invoke the lives of the enslaved population whose labor produced the cotton of which the quilt top was made--which fueled the rise of the New England textile industry. This is a terrific story, well researched and beautifully written, that both reveals the history associated with the quilt top and traces the author's efforts to unearth it."
- Joanne Pope Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England, 1789-1860
"An American Quilt cleverly weaves together the disparate fields of material cultural, northern industrialization, mercantilism, trade and slavery. Through deeply a researched history of quilter Susan Crouch, May reveals the multifaceted economic and personal relations between northern textile manufacturers and southern enslavers. Moreover, May reminds us that the handmade quilts of white antebellum slave-holding and non-slave-holding women carry unlikely histories, including those of enslaved African Americans whose labor and stories are usually unacknowledged or overlooked in traditional accounts of American quilting."
- Christy Clark-Pujra, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU)
“May follows the footsteps of Linda Lipsett and Cuesta Benberry, who revealed a more thorough picture of the contribution the African American quilt maker. These stories need to be shared over and over again and Rachel May does so brilliantly, intelligently, and with care. The history of enslaved people and today’s on-going racism is not glossed over in this deeply researched and beautifully written text. An American Quilt is a major contribution to the multilayered and complex history of quilt making in America.”
- Roderick Kiracofe, author Unconventional & Unexpected (among other books on the art and history of quilts) & art collector
"Do yourself a favor and suggest An American Quilt for your book group or quilting bee because it’s the perfect read to discuss with quilters and bibliophiles alike.The breadth and details in this book are as fascinating as the true story that forms the skeleton of
She's an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University and has been awarded residencies at the VCCA, The Vermont Studio Center and The Millay Colony.
“With precise stitch and complex patterning, Rachel May pieces together an intricate story of a family, the people that family enslaved, a writer, and a country. With as much lyrical beauty as the quilts themselves, May ties together the myriad ways the treatment of enslaved people is sewn into the fabric of our country. This book gives long-overdue credit to quilt-making and May deserves much credit for stitching this beautiful book together.”
- Nicole Walker, author of Egg, Micrograms, Quench your Thirst with Salt
"In An American Quilt, Rachel May is able to draw out the entire story of southern slavery and northern complicity from a remarkable discovery--a quilt top created in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1830s, and a notebook containing a cache of letters associated with it. From these materials, May weaves an extraordinary account of the families of the quilt makers--a Rhode Island woman descended from slave traders and the slave-holding husband who had brought her South to live. She also is able to invoke the lives of the enslaved population whose labor produced the cotton of which the quilt top was made--which fueled the rise of the New England textile industry. This is a terrific story, well researched and beautifully written, that both reveals the history associated with the quilt top and traces the author's efforts to unearth it."
- Joanne Pope Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England, 1789-1860
"An American Quilt cleverly weaves together the disparate fields of material cultural, northern industrialization, mercantilism, trade and slavery. Through deeply a researched history of quilter Susan Crouch, May reveals the multifaceted economic and personal relations between northern textile manufacturers and southern enslavers. Moreover, May reminds us that the handmade quilts of white antebellum slave-holding and non-slave-holding women carry unlikely histories, including those of enslaved African Americans whose labor and stories are usually unacknowledged or overlooked in traditional accounts of American quilting."
- Christy Clark-Pujra, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU)
“May follows the footsteps of Linda Lipsett and Cuesta Benberry, who revealed a more thorough picture of the contribution the African American quilt maker. These stories need to be shared over and over again and Rachel May does so brilliantly, intelligently, and with care. The history of enslaved people and today’s on-going racism is not glossed over in this deeply researched and beautifully written text. An American Quilt is a major contribution to the multilayered and complex history of quilt making in America.”
- Roderick Kiracofe, author Unconventional & Unexpected (among other books on the art and history of quilts) & art collector
"Do yourself a favor and suggest An American Quilt for your book group or quilting bee because it’s the perfect read to discuss with quilters and bibliophiles alike.The breadth and details in this book are as fascinating as the true story that forms the skeleton of
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 2, 2016
The Benedictines is a great read. It's funny and whimsical, and the protagonist—a teacher at a school run by Benedictine monks—is a pleasure to spend time with. Many of the descriptions (especially of marine life) read like prose poems. Rachel May is fabulous, but don't just take my word for it; Tim O'Brien himself calls "The Benedictines a taut, vivid, spellbinding and gracefully written novel." Can't get much better than that!!
June 17, 2017
This novella of an over-thinking temporary art teacher at a new England Catholic boarding school exudes podtmodern charm: our narrator is overly self aware, the narrative is as fractured as some of the characters' psyches, and the real life dilemmas of our protagonist are both real and petty. The prose is well worth the read, even if some of the reveals Icould see coming from 40 pages out.
September 1, 2023
There wasn't enough of a narrative arc for my taste, particularly in the first half of the book. It struck me as self-indulgent, as if the author were just expressing herself rather than trying to communicate something. The students at the school were annoying and not very sympathetic, and I could say the same about the faculty, including the narrator. A bunch of immature and unhappy people. This was a disappointment.
February 25, 2016
Darkly evocative, wickedly yet warmly observed, Rachel May's The Benedictines, impresses.
The authors heroine, Annie James, confronts, more bravely than she would realize until later, forces that would hurl her, like many others, into a despairing unhappiness.
She emerges from this year of trials, unsettled but stronger, and at the doorstep of a life laden with possibilities.
The authors heroine, Annie James, confronts, more bravely than she would realize until later, forces that would hurl her, like many others, into a despairing unhappiness.
She emerges from this year of trials, unsettled but stronger, and at the doorstep of a life laden with possibilities.
July 12, 2016
Stunning, heartbreaking, and redemptive.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews