This Week's Acquisitions

(Leave town for a few days, and books magically appear.  Well, not magically. Also, various books from the Strand.)

• M[ary] A. S. Barber, Missionary Tales for Little Listeners (Presbyterian Board of Publication, n.d.).  Purportedly revised and enlarged from the UK edition of 1840.  (Incidentally, has anybody ever bothered to do the work of collating the "revised," "edited," and/or "enlarged" American reprints with their UK originals?) Various children's stories about missionary work, both at home and abroad.  Barber also published poetry and hymns.
• Alice Lang, Ivan and Esther: A Tale of Jewish Life in Russia (RTS, n.d.).  Late-Victorian children's novel.  Lang, not a prolific novelist, was active in the 1880s and 1890s.
• Edith Nesbit, Power of Darkness (Wordsworth, 2006).  Reprints Nesbit's ghost stories.  Literary Gothic links to a number of e-texts. 
• George W. M. Reynolds, Wagner The Werewolf (Wordsworth, 2006).  Reprint of one of Reynolds' serials.  Reynolds is better known as the author of the wonderfully schlocky The Mysteries of London (murder! villainy! cross-dressers!).
• William H. McBurney, Four Before Richardson : 1720-1727, Selected English Novels (Nebraska, 1964).  Four novellas by authors like Eliza Haywood.
• Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk (Spiegel & Grau, 2007).  Murder and Isaac Newton, not in that order.
• Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel (Doubleday, 2007).  Romance and art in Los Angeles.
• Clare Clark, The Nature of Monsters (Harcourt, 2007).  Historical novel about scientific experimentation in the early modern era.  Oh, and deformity.
• Haruki Murakami, After Dark, trans. Jay Rubin (Knopf, 2007).  Lives intersecting on a single night in Tokyo.
• Robert Bolano, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2007).  Short-story collection about Chileans abroad.
• D. M. Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition (Carroll & Graf, 1994).  First, Auschwitz; then, the aftermath, a half-century later. 
• ---, Eating Pavlova (Carroll & Graf, 1980).  An ailing Freud delves into his memory...
• Emily Barton, The Testament of Yves Gundron (FSG, 2000).  A scholarly edition.  Or...is it?
• William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2007).  Who was actually reading what when, and how?
• David Hawkes, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  Faust, idolatry, and (eventually) the modern and postmodern condition.  I'm reviewing this for Choice. 
• Morag Shiach, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2007).  I'm thinking about using this in one of my upper-division courses next semester.
• Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Owl, 2006).   Victorian architecture & urban planning.
• Patricia Jalland, Women, Marriage, and Politics, 1860-1914 (Oxford, 1988).  Analyzes the theory and practice of marriage, as it were, among the British elite.
• William St. Clair, The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Bluebridge, 2007).  Focuses on the British trading outpost in Ghana.
• Donal A. Kerr, "A Nation of Beggars"?: Priests, People, and Politics in Famine Ireland, 1846-1852 (Oxford, 1994).  Catholicism, political agitation, and the Famine.
• Gillian Gill, Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale (Ballantine, 2004).  New(er) biography of Florence Nightingale. 
• Scottish Christian Herald, vol. II (1837).  A short-lived Church of Scotland magazine.
• Church Association Monthly Intelligencer, vols. XII-XV (1878-1881).  Longer-lived Church of England magazine with a pronounced evangelical slant.