January 2013 Archives

This is the story of a city.

The northwest corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all.  And many people in between.

Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation...

Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end.

Depicting the modern urban zone - familiar to town-dwellers everywhere - Zadie Smith's NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king's servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own--the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.

Stormy Weather & Other Stories is probably as close as Lisa Alther will ever come to writing an autobiography. These stories, written over the course of her career, are set in the three places that have meant the most to her. The first five stories reflect Alther s early years growing up in the Southern mountains close to nature, using animal imagery to make sense of her world. Four stories are set in Vermont in the milieu that shaped her as a young adult. Marinated in the politics of the 1970s the Back-to-the-Land days of hippies, communes, and the Women s Movement these stories portray the optimistic explorations of alternative models for parenthood, relationships, and sexuality that flourished during those years. 

The final three stories are set in New York City, where her characters, unmoored by nature or by tight-knit communities of like-minded friends, search for meaning within the privacy of their own souls. All the stories are loosely linked, with a minor character in one sometimes emerging to play a major role in another. Most of these stories were published in journals or anthologies, though three are previously unpublished. Birdman and the Dancer, the novella that closes the volume, has been published in Dutch, Danish, and German, but is appearing here in English for the first time. Inspired by a series of monotypes by the French artist, Francoise Gilot, it was written while many Americans were mesmerized by the television coverage of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. It embodies Alther s metaphoric response to the Gulf War, and to violence in general.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has delighted millions of fans worldwide in book and movie form. With the theatrical release of the two-part film The Hobbit slated for 2012 and 2013, attention will once again turn to J. R. R. Tolkien's classic works. In a culture where truth is relative and morality is viewed as old-fashioned, we welcome the chance to view the world through hobbit eyes: we have free will, our choices matter, and living a morally heroic life is possible.

In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Tolkien expert Matthew Dickerson shows how a Christian worldview and Christian themes undergird Tolkien's Middle-earth writings and how they are fundamentally important to understanding his vision. This revised and expanded edition of Following Gandalf includes new material on torture, social justice, and the importance of the body.

Happy New Year! Posts will resume next week with leisure reading suggestions from the VCU Libraries collections. In the meanwhile, are you looking for something to read? Lists come out all year long, but especially in December, that promote the best or most interesting books of the year. Booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both released their "Best of 2012" lists. Goodreads, a social media site for readers, has released its Choice Awards, voted on by members. The 2012 winners of the Virginia Literary Festival are another source for good reads, as well as the lists of winners and candidates for such awards as the Man Booker, National Book Award, and Pulitzer. VCU Libraries owns many, but not all, of the titles on these lists, so you may also wish to check your local public library for availability.