This Week's Acquisitions

(Two weeks' worth of books, including some desk copies.)

• Miss E. M. Stewart, The Victims of the Penal Laws; Or, Legends of History (James Duffy, [1878]).  Short stories about various sixteenth-century English Catholic martyrs.
• Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (Anchor, 2000).  Reprint of Soueif's novel about an Egyptian woman's struggles with identity as she moves between Middle Eastern and Western cultures.
• Taichi Yamada, Strangers (Vertical, 2003).  In Tokyo, a man sees dead people.
• Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers (Grove, 1994).  Reprint of Robbe-Grillet's experimental detective novel.
• Lloyd Jones, Mr. Pip (Dial, 2007).  A man and a group of schoolchildren cling to Dickens during war.
• Michael C. White, Soul Catcher (Morrow, 2007).  A slave catcher forced to contemplate the implications of his job.
• Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (Knopf, 2007).  A family scatters after an act of violence.
• Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book: A Novel (Viking, 2008).  A scholar traces the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah.
• Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (NYU, 2008).  Critique of the current state of university education.  (I'll be writing about this book at some point within the next couple of weeks.)
• Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of "The Pilgrim's Progress" (Princeton, 2003).  Historical study of the translation and circulation of Bunyan's famed allegory across Europe and Africa.
• Kenneth Hylson-Smith, Evangelicals in the Church of England 1734 - 1984 (Continuum, 1992).  Ecclesiastical history.