This Week's Acquisitions
- Henry Morgan, The Fallen Priest: A Story Founded on Fact (Shawmut, 1883). One of several anti-Catholic novels by this Irish Protestant clergyman, involving the usual mayhem, secret plots, endangered women, etc. A follow-up to Boston Inside Out. (eBay)
- Sophia Lee, The Two Emilys, ed. Julie Shaffer (Valancourt, 2009). Reprint of Lee's Gothic novel, originally featured in The Canterbury Tales, about two women named Emily enmeshed in a raging love triangle. (Amazon)
- Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary (Scribner, 2012). Novella about an elderly Mary attempting to understand her son's legacy and her own place in it. (Amazon)
- John Harding, Florence and Giles (HarperCollins, 2010). At the end of the nineteenth century, two American children experience events that seem awfully Turn of the Screw-ish. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery, trans. Richard Dixon (Mariner, 2012). The conspiracy theory novel to end all conspiracy theory novels, it appears. (Lift Bridge)
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003). Analyzes "secularism" as a mode that exists with religion, and critiques older secularization narrative models. (Amazon [secondhand])