This Week's Acquisitions
- Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith (Vintage, 2006). War, humanitarian aid, and love, all in the Sudan.
- ---, The Voyage: A Novel (Vintage, 2000). A grim twist on the ocean adventure genre.
- Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (Harcourt, 1976). Woolf pokes fun at the Victorian hagio-biography with this "life" of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog.
- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (Modern Library, 1999). A young man with a clubfoot seeks art and love in turn-of-the-century London, among other places.
- Thomas Mallon, Bandbox (Harvest Books, 2005). Dueling magazines during the Roaring Twenties.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (Vintage, 1990). Ishiguro's first novel, narrated by a Japanese woman in the wake of her daughter's suicide.
- Peter Matthiessen, Killing Mister Watson (Vintage, 1991). A "history" of the life and murder of Edgar J. Watson in the Florida Everglades.
- Charles Maurice Davies, Unorthodox London: Or, Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis, 2nd ed. (Tinsley, 1876). Anglican drops in on a wide range of religious services, ranging from Bible Christians to Catholics to Jews. Wry observations frequently follow. (Thanks to Arnold Hunt of the British Library for bringing this book to my attention.)
- The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading 5 (1858). Bound volume of a popular RTS periodical.