This Week's (Delayed) Acquisitions

Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton, 2013). Parallel-plot novel about a kidnapped computer programmer in contemporary Egypt and an academic from late-Victorian Britain, yoked together by their interest in Maimonides. (Barnes & Noble)
Jeffrey Renard Allen, Song of the Shank: A Novel (Graywolf, 2014). Historical novel about the African-American musician Thomas Greene ("Blind Tom") Wiggins. (Barnes & Noble)
Jasper Cragwall, Lake Methodism: Polite Literature and Popular Religion in England, 1780-1830 (Ohio, 2013). Argues that Romantic poetry was received by its contemporaries in terms of Methodist practices. (Scholars Choice)