This Week's Acquisitions
- David R. Slavitt, The Duke's Man: A Novel (Northwestern, 2011). Parodic riff on La Dame de Monsoreau, with "commentary," etc. (Amazon)
- Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco, 2011). A sociologist intervenes in the life of a young man on the sex crimes register, with explosive results. (BOMC)
- Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke (FSG, 2011). Second volume in Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy," following the intricate web of the nineteenth-century opium market. (BOMC)
- Jay Parini, The Passages of H.M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (Doubleday, 2011). Disgruntled novelist reminisces, fantasizes, continues seeking literary immortality. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Martin Myrone, ed., John Martin: Apocalypse (Tate, 2011). Exhibition catalog for this nineteenth-century painter, best-known for his gigantic canvases devoted to Romantic sublimity and general apocalyptic destruction. (Amazon)
- Travis DeCook and Alan Galey, eds., Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (Routledge, 2011). Collection of essays on the shaping of historical and cultural links between the two "canons." I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)
- Patricia Badir, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700 (Notre Dame, 2009). Transformations of early modern Mary Magdalenes in both Catholic and Protestant texts. (eBay)