This Week's Acquisitions

(Mostly freebies this week.)

• Kathy Acker, Great Expectations: A Novel (Grove, 1994).  Acker's postmodern rewrite of Dickens' original.
• Jane Smiley, Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf, 2007).  Smiley does the Decameron, Hollywood-style.
• Ben Forkner, ed., Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin, 1995).  Anthology of twentieth-century short fiction.
• W. Somerset Maugham, The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, vol. 2 (Penguin, 1991).  More of Penguin's four-volume edition.
• David Norbrook, ed., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509-1659 (Penguin, 1993).  A quite hefty anthology.
• Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Pantheon, 2007).  Biography of this eighteenth-century world traveler.
• Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford, 1998).  Uses Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women to discuss issues of gender and hagiography more generally.
• Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1997).  History of that now-ubiquitous (yet still-contested) element of scholarly apparatus.