This Week's Acquisitions

(While I was in NYC, I hit up the Strand [books have arrived] and Book Culture [books still in transit].)

• Mrs. J. H. Riddell, Night Shivers (Wordsworth, 2008).  Reprints most of Mrs. Riddell's ghost stories; overlaps significantly with the Dover Books collection of her work.  (Strand)
• Sarah Butler, Irish Tales; or, Instructive Histories for the Happy Conduct of Life, ed. Ian Campbell Ross et al. (Four Courts, 2010).  Despite the title, these are actually a series of historical tales set in medieval Ireland.  First published in 1715.  (Amazon)
• Edith Wharton, Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Wordsworth, 2010).  What the title says.  (Strand)
• Kenjiro Tokutomi, Footprints in the Snow: A Novel of Meiji Japan, trans. Kenneth Strong (Bobbs-Merrill, 2000).  Reprints Tokutomi's 1901 novel, inspired by David Copperfield, about a young man's coming-of-age during Japan's rapid modernization at the turn of the century.  (Strand)
• Junichiro Tanazaki, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot, trans. Anthony H. Chambers (Vintage, 2003).  Two novellas, one about a samurai with a rather...disquieting...erotic obsession, and the other about two men traveling to a remote village.  (Strand)
• Shugoro Yamamoto, The Flower Mat, trans. Eileen B. Hennessy (Tuttle, 2006).  Historical novel about a young woman's experiences in eighteenth-century Japan.  (Strand)
• A. S. Byatt, The Game: A Novel (Vintage, 1992).  Middle-aged sisters find themselves returning to the medieval storytelling game they developed as children, thanks to the reappearance of the man they both loved (and lost).  Originally published in 1967.  (Strand)
• Shirley Hazzard, Cliffs of Fall (Virago, 2005).  Short story collection.  (Strand)
• John O. Jordan, Supposing Bleak House (Virginia, 2011).  Analyzes Bleak House's Esther, focusing on the writing-Esther as opposed to the Esther written about.  (Strand)
• Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914 (Delaware, 2011).  Women and the rise of the "celebrity author."  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Rosemary Hill, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Penguin, 2008).  Biography of A. W. N. Pugin (see a few posts down).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860-1915 (Virginia, 2010).  Studies the emergence of scholarship in comparative religion.  (Strand)
• Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (Chicago, 2011).  Darwin's evolutionary theory & his abolitionism.  (Strand)