This Week's Acquisitions
- Philippe Grimbert, Memory: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008). A man recovers the truth about his parents' experiences in France during WWII.
- J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007). Political novel about political writing, featuring three narratives running simultaneously.
- Russell Banks, The Reserve (Harper, 2008). Sordid doings, romantic and otherwise, in the 1930s Adirondacks.
- Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton (Hyperion, 2008). Woman seeks truth about her background, finds various and sundry oddities.
- Amy Bloom, Away: A Novel (Random House, 2007). Russians Jews in the USA, circa the 1920s. (With characters named Burstein, no less.)
- Charlotte Elizabeth, ed., The Protestant Annual (Francis Baisler, 1841). A religious riposte to the more famous annuals, like The Keepsake; strong evangelical slant. Second of the only two volumes.
- Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (Verso, 1997). Famous series of lectures on the protean nature of "the" Antichrist. (This was one of those "huh, shouldn't I own this already?" purchases.)
- Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, 2008). The novel and the Victorian "new media." I'm reviewing this for Choice.