This Week's (Selected) Acquisitions

(I received two boxes of books as a gift, only some of which I've listed below.)

• Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun: A Novel (Pantheon, 2014).  The narrator, also named Jesse Ball, tries to unravel the mystery of a Japanese prisoner who refuses to say anything about his possible involvement in a rash of kidnappings. (Gift)
• Nell Zink, Mislaid (Harper Collins, 2015).  In the 1960s, a decidedly incompatible couple from the South separate, with the wife concealing herself and her daughter by pretending to be African-American.  Consequences ensue.  (Gift)
• Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013).  A teacher becomes passionately invested in a new family, with ultimately painful results.  (Gift)
• Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis (Overlook, 2000).  Reprint of Portis' 1985 satirical novel about a man who becomes obsessed with a sort of neo-Gnostic society during WWI.  (Gift)
• Brian Fothergill, Nicholas Wiseman (Doubleday, 1963).  Biography of the controversial cardinal (which, admittedly, I purchased because it reprints his famous "Out of the Flaminian Gate" pastoral, which is strangely absent from the 'net anywhere else than in anti-Catholic publications).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Desmond Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism (Wilfrid Laurier, 1983).  Important study of Cullen's influence in reforming and shaping the nineteenth-century Irish Church.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic (Chicago, 2008).  Analyzes two mystical texts devoted to elucidating the many names of God and their larger theological significance.  (Gift)