Description

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The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-­Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”

About the Author

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Andrew Hall is an Associate Professor of East Asian History at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. He co-edited A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020) and is the Literature Book Review Editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. In his academic life, he writes on Japanese colonial education in China and Korea, including editing and contributing to Education, Language, and the Intellectual Underpinnings of Modern Korea (Brill, 2022).

Robert Raleigh edited In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions, another short fiction collection published by Signature Books, and recently had an essay published in Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships. He is currently working on a documentary about the Indian Student Placement Program. He lives with his wife and kids and many animals in Happy Valley, Utah.