A May Bouquet

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Calisher shows Zipporah's five children creeping into a professionally respectable middle age, while their children zoom through their 20s. Zipporah is particularly close to her grandson Bertram, who is waiting for a project to happen. He has studied to be a rabbi, but avoided a post. Ten years after Debra Cohen's vanishing act, Bert finds a clue to her whereabouts and tracks her down in Europe. While Calisher's novel is much too baggy, it is also majestically persistent, with an old-fashioned faith in the novel's ability to make worlds.

For such a short book, "Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception" packs some serious punches. Authors Sam and Bethany Torode argue that all married Christians, not just Roman Catholics, need to seriously examine the widespread usage of contraception, which they feel is against God's plan for creation. (Pregnancy is not a disease, they assert. Why vaccinate against it?)

While supporting Natural Family Planning, which they define as informed abstinence, they also make a particularly uncompromising case for stay-at-home moms, which will probably irritate many readers. More controversially, they argue that a culture that worships sex without procreation will sacrifice its children through abortion, claiming that America's increasing permissiveness about legalizing contraception in the 1960s led inexorably to Roe v. Wade in the 1970s. While it's good to see some ecumenical diversity in the contraception debate, some of the basic arguments of this book are problematic.

Although Shambhala usually publishes books on Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, "The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul's Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives" is a rare and well-conceived foray into Christian mysticism. Drawing from 300 short meditations by Christian mystics and contemplatives from the fourth to 11th centuries, John Anthony McGuckin's collection is arranged around themes of practice, theory and gnosis. He cautions that the book is not meant for a rapid half-hour read-through from cover to cover in one sitting, but is instead designed to be digested slowly and thoughtfully.

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