Idylls Press is a small, independent publishing company seeking to publish the catholic (and Catholic) imagination in all its forms—primarily fiction, but also some nonfiction and poetry. We want to publish the kind of books we ourselves enjoy reading: literary works that entertain with a whopping good story, while at the same time exploring “the mystery of things”.

In other words, we very much hope to contribute to a new Catholic literary renaissance appropriate to the needs of our time.

In this effort we are grateful students of a number of past (and ongoing) literary, artistic and theological movements: the English Catholic Literary Revival launched by John Henry Cardinal Newman, the French Catholic literary revival, the so-called Holy Ghost School, the Inklings, Christian Humanism, Christian Personalism, Nouvelle Theologie, the Communio movement, and Communion and Liberation. Above all we wish to heed Christ’s injunction to cast out into the deep (cf. Lk 5:4 and John Paul II’s Novo Millenio Ineunte), drawing forth treasures from the deep places of human culture and the human heart.

At Idylls Press we also see ourselves as a home-place, formed around that fundamental structure of society, the family, for building a community of artists and craftsmen committed to “sub-creating” (in Tolkien’s phrase) a “civilization of love.” Such a daunting task cannot be accomplished, we believe, unless we (as a people and a culture) rediscover the perennial Trinitarian principle that Truth and Goodness cannot be served without an equally fervid devotion to Beauty, including the paradoxical but inescapable Beauty of the Cross. At Idylls Press, we place ourselves under the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe (la Guadalupana), the Dark Virgin of the Americas. Her beautiful and fecund Image, a true acheiropoetoi (“not made by human hands”), was given to all the people of our New World in an hour of utmost darkness and need.