Mark and Anna are fashion models and, by popular consensus, the two best looking people on Earth. So good looking, in fact, strangers faint at the sight of them and run aimlessly into traffic trying to get closer to them. A university program called formermodelsneedlongtermlovetoo.edu
brings them to the Palouse region for a first date at a secret restaurant on the Old Moscow Pullman Highway. The date goes so well that, by the end of the evening, Mark and Anna are engaged and shortly afterwards—indeed, that very day—married at a rustic church located in the Palouse hills.
During the first date, the couple are approached by a mysterious, elderly Irishman named Lebron who gives them an impromptu lecture on Saint Augustine of Hippo. It is under this man’s guidance that Mark and Anna will return to the secret restaurant on the Old Moscow Pullman Highway throughout the story, receiving spiritual guidance concerning Saint Augustine’s insights on a wide range of topics, LeBron assuring them that God has grand plans for them. One day, Mark and Anna will author a book on Saint Augustine, initiating a revival of Augustinian theology in postmodern society.
Written in what can be called a post-postmodern style—different fonts, colors, arrows, and free form hyperabstractual spacing aplenty—Mark and Anna, Models, is a treatment of Saint Augustine like you’ve never read. And when at the conclusion of the book, four ‘horsemen’ arrive across the now frozen Old Moscow Pullman Highway bearing a message from the president of the United States concerning a modeling show on the Moon and extraterrestrial-intergalactic geopolitics of the most sensitive nature, one is tempted to think, then say, ‘right, that makes sense. It could not be otherwise.’
Gracjan Kraszewski is the author of five books: the novels The Holdout, Thermonuclear Mirth, the novella, Seraphim and the Dust Plague, a book of essays, The Hippo Lectures, and the Civil War history Catholic Confederates. He earned his PhD in history from Mississippi State University and taught at the University of Illinois. He is currently Director of Intellectual Formation at the St. Augustine Center in Moscow, Idaho, while also teaching at the University of Idaho and in Washington State University’s history department and School of Design + Construction. Played baseball in college, professionally in Europe, and for the Polish National Team. Fluent in English, Polish, and French, he possesses intermediate ability in Russian, Italian, and Spanish.