[close] Ron Hansen's novels have explored spiritual themes. Atticus was inspired by the story of the prodigal son; Mariette in Ecstasy imagines an American nun who received the stigmata. In A Stay Against Confusion, his first essay collection, Hansen mines the connections between faith and fiction even more explicitly and offers fans of his novels the rare opportunity to learn how he has integrated his artistic and religious passions. Hansen, who is Catholic, writes that his love of stories has been inseparable from his love of liturgy since boyhood. And his broadminded reading of the Bible finds there "a kind of myth, a history full of facts and truths but also a fiction formed with harmony, proportion, and beauty, and fully at ease with uncertainties, metaphor, and poetic fancy." With the Bible as his touchstone, in essays such as "Writing As Sacrament" and "What Stories Are and Why We Read Them," Hansen offers clear, direct, and nuanced articulations of the common ground between literary and religious life. "Our need for stories is our need ... to have confirmed for us the theology we hold secret in our heart, that even the least of us are necessary to the great universal plot in ways we hadn't imagined." The book also contains essays of a more specialized nature, including "Eucharist" and "Stigmata," and a number of evocative autobiographical reflections, including a tribute to Hansen's mentor John Gardner. --Michael Joseph Gross