April 2011 Archives

The Artist and His Mother is a work of creative non-fiction in the form of a novel whose narrator, a painter and writer, composes not only a portrait of himself and his mother, Zaroohe, but a story of a century from when, as a child of ten, she survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915, to her death in America in 2006. The title is after Arshile Gorky's famous paintings of himself and his own mother, and here also the composition is inspired by the ghosts of the massacre. A part of this book won a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.

Cabell Library PS3564.A5 A78 2010

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"Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it--a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house--with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region--inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians-- and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Cabell Library PS3566.R697 Z46 2011

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Charles Yu, time travel technician, helps save people from themselves in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, and using a book titled "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" as his guide, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory.

Cabell Library PS3625.U15 H68 2010

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This contributed volume explores the significant role that music plays in the works of Joss Whedon, investigating the uses and meaning of music and sound in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, and the Internet musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Cabell Library ML2080 .B84 2011

Note: Quick Picks are new to the collection. Some may not yet have reached the shelves. If you want to check out an item that is not yet available, click the "Is this item available?" link in the catalog record, then click the "Request" link.