This Week's Acquisitions

  • James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still (Hamish Hamilton, 2010).  A photography exhibit turns into a meditation on the nature of modern Scotland.  (Amazon [secondhand])
  • ---, The Professor of Truth (Hamish Hamilton, 2013).  A professor turns anew to one of his obsessions: the bombing of Pan Am 103, in which his wife and child died.  (Amazon [secondhand])
  • Oscar Hijuelos, Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise (Grand Central, 2015). Hijuelos' final novel, based on the real-life friendship between Mark Twain and H. M. Stanley (of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame).  (Lift Bridge)
  • Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Michigan, 2015).  Analyzes both historical novels about Jesus and novels in which Jesus appears in the modern day, ending with a chapter on Jesus on screen.  (Amazon)
  • Richa Dwor, Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women's Writing (Bloomsbury, 2015).  Drawing on the role of midrash, uses Grace Aguilar, George Eliot, and Amy Levy to argue that we can identify a "distinctly Jewish" mode of feeling.  I'm reviewing this.  (Review copy)