This Week's Acquisitions

(Sometimes, Penguins swim freely into instructors' mailboxes.)

• D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (Penguin, 1993).  Controversial novel about, among other things, the Babi Yar massacre. 
• Geraldine Brooks, March (Penguin, 2006).  Little Women's Mr. March and his experiences in the Civil War.
• Sebastian Barry, Annie Dunne (Penguin, 2003).  A woman's experiences in Ireland during the 1950s.
• Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Penguin, 1990).  Reprint of Hazzard's prizewinning novel about two young Australian women in England. 
• M. R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (Penguin, 2005).  The first of what looks like a multi-volume set of James' short stories. 
• Michael Michie, An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison (Tuckwell, 1997).  Life of the well-known conservative historian and critic.  For more on Alison, see the Glasgow Digital Library and Thoemmes. 
• Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology And Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005).  As the title suggests, a critical study of anti-Catholic rhetoric from a literary point of view.
• Christopher Wordsworth, Sequel to Letters to M. Gondon on the Destructive Character of the Church of Rome, Both in Religion and Polity (Rivington, 1848).  High Church attack on Roman Catholicism.  More on Wordsworth (who was, indeed, related to William) at the Cyberhymnal.
• Thomas Vowler Short, A Sketch of the History of the Church of England to the Revolution, 1688, 3rd ed. (John Henry Parker, 1840).  A somewhat dilapidated copy; it was owned by a J. H. Ainsworth, who--if the bookplate's coat of arms and motto are any indication--was related to Richard Ainsworth (scroll down & highlight).  Short, Bishop of Sodor and Man and, at the time of his death, of St. Asaph, was also E. B. Pusey's tutor.  There's a photograph of Short here.
• Susan Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).  Poetry and "borders" of various sorts.  I'm reviewing it for Choice.