This Week's Acquisitions

(INCOMING.  If you're my parents, don't read this post.  You've been warned.)

(Some of the books were free and/or the result of some handy gift cards.)

• John Williams, Stoner (NYRB, 2006).  Reprint of Williams' novel about an early twentieth-century English professor and his experience of life's highs and lows.   First published in 1965. (Strand)
• Colm Toibin, The Heather Blazing (Penguin, 1994).  An Irish High Court judge sinks into moral and emotional stasis. (Strand)
• ---, The Story of the Night (Scribner, 2005).  A closeted gay Argentinean during the aftermath of the Falklands War.  (Strand)
• A. S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman (Vintage, 2004).  A woman is caught up in the social and sexual upheaval of England in the 60s.  Last of the series that began with The Virgin in the Garden.  (Strand)
• Thomas Keneally, Office of Innocence: A Novel (Anchor, 2004). A priest in WWII Australia finds himself increasingly strained by his parishioners' complex moral and spiritual problems.  (Strand)
• Shusako Endo, The Sea and Poison: A Novel, trans. Michael Gallagher (Tuttle, 1991).  Based on a horrific real-life case of medical experimentation during WWII.  Originally published in 1958.  (Strand)
• Christian Jungersen, The Exception (Anchor, 2008).  Office gossip amongst a group of women goes increasingly and horribly wrong.  (Strand)
• Jim Crace, All That Follows (Vintage, 2011).  Jazz musician and would-be radical tries to get his revolution on.  (Strand)
• David Rocklin, The Luminist: A Novel (Hawthorne, 2011).  Historical novel inspired by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and set in Ceylon.  For other novels directly about Cameron, see Lynne Truss' Tennyson's Gift and Helen Humphreys' Afterimage.  (Strand)
• Richard Harvell, The Bells: A Novel (Broadway, 2011). Historical novel about an eighteenth-century Swiss opera singer.  (Strand)
• Andrew Caldecott, Not Exactly Ghosts/Fires Burn Blue (Wordsworth, 2007).  Collection of Caldecott's short stories, initially published in the 1940s.    (Strand)
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011).  Love and marriage, English-majors style, with plenty of allusions to that staple of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist fiction, the marriage plot.  (BOMC)
• Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers: A Novel (Scribner, 2011).  Historical novel about the Jews at Masada.  (BOMC)
• Amyas Northcote, In Ghostly Company (Wordsworth, 2010).  Collection of horror stories.  (Strand)
• A. C. and R. H. Benson, The Temple of Death and Other Stories (Wordsworth, 2007).  Anthology of stories by two of the three brothers Benson (all of whom wrote horror, among other things; R. H. wrote some well-known Catholic novels).  (Strand)
• Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard, 2010).  Non-hagiographical biography of one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish politics and culture.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael A. Rutz, The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics, and Empire, 1790-1850 (Baylor, 2011).  Studies early nineteenth-century Congregationalist missionary work.  (Strand)
• Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law, and Christianity, 1830-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  Some of the unintended consequences of the various imperial missions.  (Strand)
• Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge, 2011).  Representations and transformations in poetry and elsewhere.  (Review copy)
• Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2010).  Comparative study of religion and narrative in English, French, and German fiction.  (Review copy)
• Ann-Janine Morey, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature (Cambridge, 2008).  Nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth century fiction, focusing on the role of pastors in mediating the relation between religious belief and sexual desire.  (Review copy)
• Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, eds., The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge, 2011).   What it says on the tin: reading the Bible, rewriting the Bible, Biblical echoes... (Review copy)
• Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009).  Catholicism as associated with the oral; oral constructions of Catholicism; Catholicism and oral traditions.  (Review copy)
• Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Mutual influence of anti-Catholic politics, texts, and sentiments.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale, 2009).  Religion and conspicuous consumption in the nineteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago, 2006).  Studies how painters have represented reading across the century.  (NYPL Store)