This Week's Acquisitions
- Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (Penguin, 2007). A new collection of Stoker's short fiction. (Penguin, incidentally, has lately been reprinting quite a bit of "weird" fiction--Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Lovecraft, etc.)
- Dan Simmons, The Terror: A Novel (Little, Brown, and Company, 2007). Historical horror based on the expedition of Sir John Franklin.
- Thomas Bernhard, The Loser: A Novel (Vintage, 2006). Translation of Bernhard's 1983 novel (told in a single paragraph) about obsessive acolytes of the pianist Glenn Gould.
- ---, Gargoyles: A Novel (Vintage, 2006). A dark expedition through Austria.
- Alessandro Baricco, Silk (Vintage, 1998). A man conducts a unique love affair while negotiating for silk in nineteenth-century Japan.
- ---, Without Blood (Knopf, 2004). Childhood innocence, war, and vengeance.
- ---, City (Vintage, 2003). Teenage mathematical whiz kid, story-telling, and escapism.
- Molly Youngkin, Feminist Realism at the Fin-de-Siecle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (Ohio State, 2007). Examines the emergence of a "feminist realist" aesthetic in 1890s periodicals, arguing that it influenced early modernist experimentation. I'm reviewing it for Choice.
- Henry Edward Manning, The Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown in Matters Spiritual. A Letter to the Right Reverend Ashurst-Turner, Lord Bishop of Chichester (John Murray, 1850). Analysis of the Royal Supremacy, published a year before Manning converted to Catholicism. Lytton Strachey published a famous short study of Manning in Eminent Victorians; the Catholic Encyclopedia, not surprisingly, is rather more favorable. But be sure to read David Newsome's lovely The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning. The National Portrait Gallery has quite a few portraits.
- [William Balmbro Flower], A Revival of Old Church of England Principles, No New Faith. A Few Plains Words Addressed to Those Who Think (Joseph Masters, 1849). Tract in support of the Oxford Movement.
- Edward Meyrick Goulbourn, Sermons Preached on Different Occasions During the Last Twenty Years, 2 vols. in 1 (D. Appleton, 1867). Er, sermons.
- Jeremy Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford, 2005). Historical analysis of Maurice as a thinker attempting to unite the Church.