This Week's Acquisitions

I thought that I had escaped most avenues of temptation, but then I stumbled into a Den of Iniquity (i.e., the display copy sale on the last day).

• H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (Penguin, 2004). Cthulhu and the like.

• Lord Dunsany, In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (Penguin, 2004). Cult fantasist of the early twentieth century. (I got about 3/4 of the way through this on the Washington-to-Rochester leg of my trip, and while I found the stories reasonably involving, I could also feel the prose slithering in one eye and right out the other--the style renders the content far too slippery.)

• Madison Smartt Bell, The Stone That the Builder Refused (Pantheon, 2004). Final volume in Bell's trilogy about Toussaint L'Ouverture.

• Peter Ackroyd, The Clerkenwell Tales (Talese, 2004). Ackroyd takes on Chaucer.

• Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford, 2003). Most recent biography of the famed evangelical.

• Bernard Bergonzi, A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford, 2003). One of the other Arnolds.

• John Chapple and Alan Shelston, eds., Further Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Palgrave, 2000). Exactly what it sounds like--an addendum to Chapple's earlier collected edition.