Book ReMarks: Fiction and Literature

Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award.

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection--and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations.

A father's life is upended by his son's night terrors--and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of "empty-nest syndrome"; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes--on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there's something off, something sinister, in his late parents' house.

Dan Chaon's stories feature scattered families, unfulfilled dreamers, anxious souls. They exist in a twilight realm--in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.

Cabell Library PS3553.H277 S73 2012

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"The Death of Bonnie and Clyde" and Other Stories follows the trail of its wayward characters down the Delta back roads, crossing paths with Hernando DeSoto--hands bloodied by the indian slaughters--hitchhikers and thieves, UFO's, concrete finishers, naked fishermen, a lusty cheer squad caught and confessing in the midst of a killer tornado, and trash telescope salesmen on the day after Christmas-all saintly guardians of the human heart. From the Florida Coast up through the Carolinas and over to Arkansas' Ozarks, Bonnie and Clyde blazes a trail of love and deceit, hard liquor and the revelation of what it's like tp be free and wild and in love on this earth.

Cabell Library PS3607.I45 D43 2011

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Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

Cabell Library PS3603.H755 W43 2012

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After tragic events tear Mickey Bolitar away from his parents, he is forced to live with his estranged Uncle Myron and switch high schools, where he finds both friends and enemies, but when his new new girlfriend, Ashley, vanishes, he follows her trail into a seedy underworld that reveals she is not what she seems to be.

Cabell Library Young Adult Literature (4th floor) PZ7.C635 S54 2011

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Like a surreal and highly caffeinated version of The Big Chill, Jonathan Coe's new novel follows four students who knew each other in college in the eighties. Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events. Robert has his life changed forever by the misunderstandings that arise from her condition. Terry spends his wakeful nights fueling his obsession with movies. And an increasingly unstable doctor, Gregory, sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which he must eradicate.

But after ten years of fretful slumber and dreams gone bad, the four reunite in their college town to confront their disorders. In a Gothic cliffside manor being used as a clinic for sleep disorders, they discover that neither love, nor lunacy, nor obsession ever rests.

Cabell Library PR6053.O26 H68 2008

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Quentin and his friends are now the kings and queens of Fillory, but the days and nights of royal luxury are starting to pall. After a morning hunt takes a sinister turn, Quentin and his old friend Julia charter a magical sailing ship and set out on an errand to the wild outer reaches of their kingdom. Their pleasure cruise becomes an adventure when the two are unceremoniously dumped back into the last place Quentin ever wants to see: his parent's house in Chesterton, Massachusetts. And only the black, twisted magic that Julia learned on the streets can save them.

The Magician King is a grand voyage into the dark, glittering heart of magic, an epic quest for the Harry Potter generation. It also introduces a powerful new voice, that of Julia, whose angry genius is thrilling. Once again Grossman proves that he is the modern heir to C.S. Lewis, and the cutting edge of literary fantasy.

Cabell Library PS3557.R6725 M28 2011

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Mae, a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, spends her free time wandering the desert with a rifle, or sitting in her trailer obsessively watching replays of an old lover escaping the wreckage of 9/11. What she sees in those images is different from what the rest of us would see. She revels in the pure anarchy, thrills at the destruction. These images recall memories of a childhood marked by unthinkable abuse, of her drift into a cult that committed the most shocking crime of the '60s, of her life since then as a feral and wary outsider, caught in a swirl of events at once personal, political, mythic.

Cabell Library PS3552.E517 C65 2011

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Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T.C. Boyle's powerful new novel combines pulse-pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the island's endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.

Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma's grandmother Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise's mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights' activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing's Done will offer no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle's classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in a position to decide.

Cabell Library PS3552.O932 W48 2011

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When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century would struggle to live by them.

Conchita, a voluptuous, headstrong single woman of a certain age, sees nothing wrong with enjoying the company of handsome--and usually much younger--men . . . that is, until she encounters a widower with unusual gifts and begins to think about what she really wants out of life.

Julieta, Conchita's younger sister, walks a more traditional path, but she and her husband each harbor secrets that could change their marriage and their lives forever. Their twin sons, both in college, struggle to find fulfillment. Mateo refuses to let anyone stand in the way of his happiness, while Rolando grapples with his sexuality and the family's expectations. And from time to time, Belén, the family's late matriarch, pays a visit to advise, scold, or cajole her hapless descendants.

A delightful family tapestry woven with the threads of all those whose lives are touched by Conchita, The Book of Want is an enchanting blend of social and magical realism that tells a charming story about what it means to be fully human.

Cabell Library PS3615.L58 B66 2011

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In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.

Cabell Library PL856.U696 S4913 2011

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Walking a lonely forested valley on a spring morning in upstate New York, having been hired by a developer to dowse the land, Cassandra Brooks comes upon the shocking vision of a young girl hanged from a tree. When she returns with authorities to the site, the body has vanished, leaving in question Cassandra's credibility if not her sanity. The next day, on a return visit with the sheriff to have another look, a dazed, mute missing girl emerges from the woods, alive and the very picture of Cassandra's hanged girl.

What follows is the narrative of ever-deepening and increasingly bizarre divinations that will lead this gifted young woman, the struggling single mother of twin boys, hurtling toward a past she'd long since thought was behind her. The Diviner's Tale is at once a journey of self-discovery and an unorthodox murder mystery, a tale of the fantastic and a family chronicle told by an otherwise ordinary woman.

When Cassandra's dark forebodings take on tangible form, she is forced to confront a life spiraling out of control. And soon she is locked in a mortal chess match with a real-life killer who has haunted her since before she can remember.

Cabell Library PS3563.O8754 D58 2011

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Arthouse is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic--The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell's inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor's journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.

Cabell Library PS3554.E8358 A89 2011

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A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur's recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband's approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height--and then there's the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes Figures in a Landscape feel radiant, visionary, and exhilarating, rather than elegiac. Mazur's masterly fusion of abstraction with the facts of a life creates a coming to terms with what Yeats called "the aboriginal ice."

Cabell Library PS3563.A987 F54 2011

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A rookie paramedic pulls a young woman alive from her totaled car, a first rescue that begins a lifelong tangle of love and wreckage. Sheila Arsenault is a gorgeous enigma, streetwise and tough-talking, with haunted eyes, fierce desires, and a never-look-back determination. Peter Webster, as straight an arrow as they come, falls for her instantly and entirely. Soon Sheila and Peter are embroiled in an intense love affair, married, and parents to a baby daughter. Like the crash that brought them together, it all happened so fast.

Cabell Library PS3569.H7385 R46 2010

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The ineffable nature of grieving and belief inspires a tender, gritty, and breathtaking work of graphic storytelling from the creators of The Savage.

"Slogger, man," I said. "Your dad's dead."
"I know that, Davie. But it's him. He's come back again, like he said he would."

Do you believe in life after death? Slog does. He believes that the scruffy man on a bench outside the butcher shop is his dad, returned to visit him one last time. Slog's friend Davie isn't so sure. Can it be that some mysteries are never meant to be solved? And that belief, at times, is its own reward? The acclaimed creators of The Savage reunite for a feat of graphic storytelling that defies categorization. Eerie, poignant, and masterful, Slog's Dad is a tale of astonishing power and complexity.

Cabell Library Juvenile Literature (4th floor) PZ7.A448 S76 2011

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As in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, place is at the center of Cynthia Morrison Phoel's debut collection of linked stories. Quirky, remote, and agonizingly intimate, the ragged village of Old Mountain is home to a cast of Bulgarian townsfolk who do daily battle with the heat or the bitter cold, with soul-crushing poverty, with petty disagreements among themselves--all the while attempting to adapt to changing times and keep up with their neighbors. Money is tight in this valley of run-down Communist blocks and crumbling plaster houses, but community is tighter.

When a largely unemployed father in "A Good Boy" trades his much-needed summer earnings for a hulking satellite dish, everyone knows about it. The same way everyone knows about the shop lady who rests her finger on the scale to drive up the price of cheese in "Galia." In "Satisfactory Proof," a budding mathematician completes a prestigious master's degree in number theory but fails to recognize the patterns of care and compassion everywhere around him. And in the concluding novella, "Cold Snap," as the town endures freezing temperatures and waits for the central heat to be turned on, the characters we have already met make a satisfying encore appearance--as the brittle cold pushes them to the edge of reason.

Cabell Library PS3616.H59 C65 2010

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Calendar of Regrets is a wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel--through time, space, narrative, and death.

The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather's mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon's daughter's point of view--these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.

Cabell Library PS3565.L777 C36 2010

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Laura Horton is different. Not in any noticeable, first-glance kind of way; but inside, she's equally uncomfortable around the snippy girls in her class and the strange boy, Leon, who just moved in nearby. She'd rather be writing or drawing or spending time with her free-spirited family in their eccentric old house. But Laura and Leon are more alike than they first realize. They're both outsiders. They both have secrets. And try as she might to avoid him, Laura finds herself drawn to Leon's quiet boldness as surely as she is driven to find out more about her home's enigmatic former owner. Together they probe the mysteries of the Visconti House, making an exploration into the past that will change their lives -- and open their hearts -- forever.

Cabell Library Juvenile Literature (4th floor) PZ7.E2255 V57 2011

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One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything--home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone--never to get them back.

William Boyd's electrifying follow-up to the Costa Award-winning Restless, Ordinary Thunderstorms is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the seamy underbelly of every city.

Cabell Library PR6052.O9192 O73 2010

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Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she's left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell's story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.

Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard's beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl-and a life-that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

Cabell Library PS3616.I8845 F38 2011

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Meredith Sue Willis' Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.

Cabell Library PS3573.I45655 O88 2010

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In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner and acclaimed author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, gives us exquisite fiction filled with suspense, depth, and beauty, in which history, politics, and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition.

In the title story, a professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. In "A Man Like Him," a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. In "The Proprietress," a reporter from Shanghai travels to a small town to write an article about the local prison, only to discover a far more intriguing story involving a shopkeeper who offers refuge to the wives and children of inmates. In "House Fire," a young man who suspects his father of sleeping with the young man's wife seeks the help of a detective agency run by a group of feisty old women.

Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and modern, to create a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

Cabell Library PL2946.Y59 G65 2010

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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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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The first strip of Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel's famous counterculture comic strip, appeared in 1983. The strips collected in this volume chronicle the massive changes that took place between then and 2008, built into and around the lives of a group of recurring characters. Over the twenty-five years covered, they watch, protest, observe, are part of, and rail against what's going on in the United States and the world, always bringing an LGBT perspective to what's happening. That perspective changes over time, reflecting increased acceptance of the characters by society even as they struggle to define themselves and remain true to ideals that parenthood, marriage, and increased acceptance itself force them to reconsider. This collection is by turns funny, sad, engaging, and eye-opening in its frank and forthright treatment of the lives of LGBT people in the United States over the last quarter century. Bechdel, author of the award-winning autobiography Fun Home, draws in a style reminiscent of her stylistic idols, Hergé and R. Crumb.

Cabell Library PN6728.D94 B475 2008

Internationally acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper continues to study the material he's always explored honestly, but does so now-in stories-with a sense of awareness and a satirical touch that exploits and winks at his mastery of this world. As it has done for decades, Cooper's taut, controlled prose lays bare the compulsions and troubling emptiness of the human soul.

Cabell Library PS3553.O582 U35 2009

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In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs and in Cambridge, Massachussetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly, desperate to do anything to keep her. Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era, Percival's Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecks--and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

Cabell Library PS3552.Y42 P47 2010

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Anne Carson's haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years--a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out "book in a box." Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus "for his brother who died in the Troad." Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated "book" creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry. 50 color and black-and-white prints

Cabell Library PS3553.A7667 N69 2010

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Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience--a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more--these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

Cabell Library PS3557.I1392 S57 2010

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On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother--her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother--tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden--her mother's life outside the home, her father's detachment, her brother's clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

Cabell Library PS3552.E538447 P37

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After being saved from death by none other than Henry Fonda and engaging in a brief but ill-fated collaboration with legendary director John Ford, Irish rebel Henry Smart ends up settling into a quiet life in a village north of Dublin, where he finds work as a caretaker for a boys' school and takes up with a widow O'Kelly (who may be his long-disappeared wife). But a political bombing in Dublin in 1974 puts him in the spotlight, and suddenly the secret of his rebel past is out.

Cabell Library PR6054.O95 D43 2010

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An unforgettable coming-of-age story and a luminous portrayal of a dramatic era of American history, Rebecca Chace's Leaving Rock Harbor takes readers into the heart of a New England mill town in the early twentieth century.

On the eve of World War I, fourteen-year-old Frankie Ross and her parents leave their simple life in Poughkeepsie to seek a new beginning in the booming city of Rock Harbor, Massachusetts. Frankie's father finds work in a bustling cotton mill, but erupting labor strikes threaten to dismantle the town's socioeconomic structure. Frankie soon befriends two charismatic young men--Winslow Curtis, privileged son of the town's most powerful politician, and Joe Barros, a Portuguese mill worker who becomes a union organizer--forming a tender yet bittersweet love triangle that will have an impact on all three throughout their lives. Inspired in part by Chace's family history, Frankie's journey to adulthood takes us through the First World War and into the Jazz Age, followed by the Great Depression--from rags to riches and back again. Her life parallels the evolution of the mill town itself, and the lost promise of a boomtown that everyone thought would last forever.

Of her acclaimed novel Capture the Flag, the Los Angeles Times said, "Chace's writing resembles a generation of New York writers heavily influenced by John Updike: Rick Moody, A. M. Homes, Susan Minot, and, more recently, Melissa Bank." With its lyrical prose and compelling style, Leaving Rock Harbor further establishes Chace's position in that literary tradition.

Cabell Library PS3553.H17 L43 2010

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When a mail bomb explodes in the campus office next door, Lee, an Asian American math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest, comes under suspicion. The authorities believe he may be the infamous "brain bomber," an elusive terrorist whose primary targets are prominent scientists and mathematicians.

In the midst of campus tumult and grief over the star computer scientist who was killed by the bomb, Lee receives a disturbing letter from a figure in his past. Certain he is being targeted for revenge, he begins confronting key events in his life. Misunderstood by the people around him, Lee is not conscious that his behavior has begun to heighten suspicion in the minds of his colleagues, students, and neighbors, leading the FBI to designate him "a person of interest" and pushing his life and reputation to the verge of ruin.

Intricately plotted and engrossing, A Person of Interest asks how far one man can run from his past, and explores the impact of scrutiny and suspicion in an age of terror. With its propulsive drive and vividly realized characters, Susan Choi's latest novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important young novelists chronicling the American experience.

Cabell Library PS3553.H584 P47 2008

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Group Portrait from Hell describes a world of human suffering--from the mythological Fall, through ancient cultural and individual histories up to the present--through failures of love to overcome our conflicts and mortalities. These conditions are alleviated by interludes of philosophical speculation, humor, and moments of mutual recognition and communion. But, overall, these carefully honed and often formal poems describe a tragic human condition rather than a "divine comedy" as our common fate.

Cabell Library PS3569.C514 G76 2009

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Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley's brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley's deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley's own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating mind at work--one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature.

Cabell Library PS3607.R525 G74 2010

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If you haven't already heard, VCU is hosting "Larry Levis: A Celebration," a three-day celebration of Levis and his work featuring readings and panel discussions 9/22, 9/23, and 9/24. Events will be held at James Branch Cabell Library and at Grace Street Theater. More information can be found here, and the conference program is here. More information on Larry Levis can be found at these sites:

Contemporary Authors Online (VCU-only)
Obituary in The New York Times
Poets.org
Wikipedia

In the internationally acclaimed author's first novel since Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana applies his prickly wit, nihilistic vision, and utterly original voice to this side-splitting spin on Fu Manchu.

A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land's End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort Dr. Obregon Petrie attempt to thwart Fu Manchu's latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas, matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies.

The Shanghai Gesture is not a genre farce, but a compelling tale that merges the author's trademark eye for social satire with the beautifully poetic sensibilities of his previous novels.

Cabell Library PS3559.N335 S52 2009

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Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from wartorn Europe to find that his brother, Daniel, has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful career in the movies, and a heroic past choose to kill himself?

Determined to uncover the truth, Ben enters the maze of the studio system and the uneasy world beneath the glossy shine of the movie business. For this is the moment when politics and the dream factories are beginning to collide as Communist witch hunts render the biggest stars and star makers vulnerable. Even here, where the devastation of Europe seems no more real than a painted movie set, the war casts long and dangerous shadows. When Ben learns troubling facts about his own family's past, he is caught in the middle of a web of deception that shakes his moral foundation to its core.

Cabell Library PS3561.A476 S73 2009

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In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England over the span of six thousand years. Their narratives are woven together in patterns of recurring events, strange traditions, and uncanny visions. First, a cave-boy loses his mother, falls in love, and learns a deadly lesson. He is followed by an extraordinary cast of characters: a murderess who impersonates her victim, a fisherman who believes he has become a different species, a Roman emissary who realizes the bitter truth about the Empire, a crippled nun who is healed miraculously by a disturbing apparition, an old crusader whose faith is destroyed by witnessing the ultimate relic, two witches, lovers, who burn at the stake. Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land.

In the tradition of Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Schwob's Imaginary Lives, and Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell, Lost Girls) travels through history blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing.

Now available in paperback for the first time in America! With an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, a signature of full-color plates by Jose Villarrubia, and a cover design by Chip Kidd.

Cabell Library PR6063.O593 V65 2009

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Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls Michael Ondaatje or Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the 20th century everyman, cast out from the clan in the name of nation, progress and modernity who cannot help but leave behind a shadow that yearns for the impossible dreams of love, land and home. Before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Maman, fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros mountains, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba. But after he becomes orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new Shah, Reza Pahlavi I.; he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, re-named Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step. The Age of Orphans follows Reza on his meteoric rise in ranks, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman and his eventual deployment, as Capitan, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant Kurds. Here Reza is responsible for policing, and sometimes killing, his own people, and it is here that his carefully crafted persona begins to fissure and crack.

Cabell Library PS3611.H315 A73 2009

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Nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US to find work. Recently, it has dawned on her that he isn't the only man who has left town. In fact, there are almost no men in the village--they've all gone north. While watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men--her own "Siete Magníficos"--to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the bandidos who plan on taking it over.

Cabell Library PS3571.R74 I56 2009

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A mesmerizing novel about memory, guilt, power, and violence

"In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county." So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon's gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What's more, the name of the owner is blacked out.

Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest--lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer--that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America's current military misadventures--and Loesch's secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what--and who--might lie at the heart of Loesch's property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, "contains enough electricity to light up the country."

Cabell Library PS3562.E489 C37 2009

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Fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in graphic, disturbingly precise detail from the dark and disturbing point of view of the executioner rather than the victim. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself.

Cabell Library PQ3939.L58 B513 2009

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Incarceron is a prison so vast that it contains not only cells, but also metal forests, dilapidated cities, and vast wilderness. Finn, a seventeen-year-old prisoner, has no memory of his childhood and is sure that he came from Outside Incarceron. Very few prisoners believe that there is an Outside, however, which makes escape seems impossible.

And then Finn finds a crystal key that allows him to communicate with a girl named Claudia. She claims to live Outside- she is the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, and doomed to an arranged marriage. Finn is determined to escape the prison, and Claudia believes she can help him. But they don't realize that there is more to Incarceron than meets the eye. Escape will take their greatest courage and cost more than they know.

Cabell Library Young Adult Literature (4th floor) PZ7.F4995 In 2010

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In 1704 the French colony of Louisiana needs wives for the struggling settlers and Elisabeth and twenty-three other girls are dispatched to satisfy the request. The skeptical bride soon falls in love with her charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious soldier-husband, Jean-Claude, a passion which is shared by an abandoned cabin boy, Auguste, who has also fallen under the spell of the dashing Jean-Claude. When in time Jean-Claude betrays them both, the two find themselves bound together in ways they never anticipated.

Cabell Library PR6103.L3725 S28 2010

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When Mary Anning uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home on the English coast, she sets the religious fathers on edge, the townspeople to vicious gossip, and the scientific world alight. Luckily, Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, and in the struggle to be recognized in the wider world, Mary and Elizabeth discover that friendship is their greatest ally.

Cabell Library PS3553.H4367 R46 2010b

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One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.

A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he's only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to "unwrap" his talent . . .

Passion or necessity--or the often uneasy combination of the two--determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp.

An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed works of fiction.

Cabell Library PR6059.S5 N63 2009

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What gladdens her is the spoon
with its tiny saucer of remnants,
its slender shaft, scrubbed last--
and now the kitchen's clean

Sara London grew up in California and Vermont, and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has worked as an editor in New York, and as a journalist on Cape Cod. She teaches creative writing and literature at Mount Holyoke College, and has taught at Amherst and Smith colleges. She lives with her husband, writer Dean Albarelli, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Cabell Library PS3562.O48815 T97 2010

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In his first collection of poetry and prose, award-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch proves that he is also an accomplished poet. Penned over a span of many years, the poems in These Extremes deal with a wide variety of subjects. Many focus on Bausch's own family and relationships. In one long, touching poem, "Barbara (1943-1974)," the poet memorializes his oldest sister, who died young. He also offers two prose memory pieces, recollections from his childhood and adolescence. In these brief "essays," Bausch draws loving but unsentimental portraits of his father, mother, and other relatives as he reflects on the sense of belonging that he gained from his family--something he hopes to pass on to his own children in this violent, chaotic world. In "Back Stories," the center of the book, Bausch effortlessly weaves poems around familiar characters from history, literature, movies, and popular culture--including Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sam, the piano player from Casablanca. Decidedly accessible in form, theme, and expression, These Extremes will surprise and delight lovers of poetry and fans of Bausch's stories and novels.

Cabell Library PS3552.A846 T49 2009

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When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt; they only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers -- with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive former lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.

Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry: about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life -- even after death.

Cabell Library PS3564.I362 H47 2009

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The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park--Chuck Palahniuk's finest novel since the generation-defining Fight Club.

"Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc."

Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.

It's a comedy. And a romance.

Cabell Library PS3566.A4554 P94 2009

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Reviewed by Ibironke Lawal, Engineering and Science Librarian

This collection of five short stories is electrifying and informative. In vivid language, the author tells the African stories of poverty, child slavery and human trafficking, religious persecution and intolerance, and genocide. What is so powerful about this book is that in all the stories, children are the victims, and they tell their own stories. The tragedy of Africa's children unfolds in this book. Though it is fiction, the events depicted in the stories are real. In poverty-stricken Africa, some children have to live on the streets, sniff glue to ward off hunger, and even prostitute to help their families. Again and again, children are victims of adults' greed and excesses. They are orphaned by A.I.D.S. because of their parents' indiscriminate unprotected sex and ignorance, and also by self destruction through religious war and genocide. Genocide is the most severe crime against humanity. Killing of parents by other family members is already an abominable act, but doing it in the presence of their children is unforgivable. The children in these stories know, if they survive, how to persevere, and they emerge from a life of tragedy to a life full of hope and aspirations. The children in Akpan's book are the heroes of our violent world.

Cabell Library PR9387.9.A3935 S29 2008

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper's shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Cabell Library PL858.G37 H3513 20099

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In this ambitious collection, Kevin Stein enters the volatile intersection of private lives and larger public history. In poems variously formal and experimental, improvisational and narrative, wisely silly and playfully forlorn, Stein renders the human carnival flexed across the tattooed bulk of "history's bicep."
Musical and refreshingly unaffected, Stein's poems yoke the domains of high and low art. His poems address subjects by turns surprising, edgy, and humorous. They offer musings on the Slinky and the atomic bomb, elegies for a miscarried pregnancy and the late physicist Edward Teller, reflections on night-shift factory work and President Eisenhower's golf caddy, and meditations on the politics of post-colonialism and a youthful antiwar streaking incident. Against this vivid backdrop parades a motley cast of American characters seeking wiry balance in a fragile world.

Cabell Library PS3569.T3714 S84 2009

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"The Blue Manuscript" is the ultimate prize for any collector of Islamic treasures. But does it still exist, and if so, can it be found? In search of answers to these questions, an assortment of archaeologists heads for a remote area of Egypt, where they work with local villagers to excavate a promising site. But as social and cultural preconceptions amongst both visitors and hosts start to unravel, the mystery seems only to deepen and darken...What do the fables of the village storyteller mean for the westerners, and can their emotional equilibrium and scholarly integrity survive exposure to the realities of the world they have studied from afar?Interspersed with the testimony of the early medieval calligrapher who created the "Blue Manuscript", Sabiha Al Khemir's subtle, graceful narrative builds into a rich tapestry of human love, hope, despair, greed, fear and betrayal. Intensified at every turn by the uneasy relationship between Islam past and present, and between Islam and the West, The Blue Manuscript is a novel which will resonate long after the astonishing solution to its mystery has finally been revealed.

Cabell Library PR9408.T83 K54 2008

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As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle-the creator of Sherlock Holmes-studied under one of the pioneers in forensic medicine, Dr. Joseph Bell. While details of Doyle's actual relationship with the Doctor remain shrouded in mystery, author David Pirie has created an engrossing series that pairs the two as partners in criminal investigations in the dark underworlds of Victorian Edinburgh.

The Night Calls chronicles their most frightening and disturbing case, the encounter with the man who prefigures Holmes' archnemesis Moriarty. A series of bizarre and outlandish assaults on women in the brothels of Edinburgh has caught the attention of Bell, who calls on Doyle to assist in the investigation. At the same time, however, there's a violent struggle for women's educational rights taking place at the university's medical school where Doyle is a student. There he meets young Elsbeth Scott, a fellow student with an unfortunate list of enemies, among them a crazed misogynist student name Crawford, and the smiling hypocritical patron of the university, Henry Carlisle.

Bell slowly begins to realize that the increasingly freakish crimes indicate a heretofore unknown and terrifying kind of criminal, one who is not susceptible to the Doctor's old methods. The Night Calls takes them from the evil heart of old Edinburgh into what Bell calls their "fight against the future" and to London itself, where Doyle again faces a villain with terrifying results.

Cabell Library PR6066.I76 N544 2008

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When Michael Crawford discovers his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed, he is forced to flee not only to prove his innocence, but to avoid the deadly embrace of a vampire who has claimed him as her true bridegroom. Joining forces with Byron, Keats, and Shelley in a desperate journey that crisscrosses Europe, Crawford desperately seeks his freedom from this vengeful lover who haunts his dreams and will not rest until she destroys all that he cherishes.

Cabell Library PS3566.O95 S77 2008

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From a National Book Award finalist--for her memoir American Chica--and the author of the acclaimed novel Cellophane comes this spare, powerful story of sexual obsession and its consequences.

Carlos Bluhm leads the good life in upper-class Lima: he attends social functions with his elegant wife, goes out drinking with his three best friends, has the occasional, fleeting assignation. . . . Until he meets Maria Fernandez, a dancer at a tango bar in a rough part of town. The beautiful sixteen-year-old intoxicates him. An indigenous dark-skinned Peruvian, she represents everything his safe white world does not, and soon he can't get her out of his mind. They begin a passionate affair, one that will destroy his marriage and shatter the only reality he's ever known.

Flash forward twenty years: against all odds, Carlos and Maria have remained together. But when Maria finally presses for a formal commitment, feelings long suppressed erupt in a tense endgame that sends both of them hurtling toward a dangerous resolution that will forever alter their lives.

Brilliantly realized, erotic, unsentimental, Lima Nights is a unique love story and a stunning work of fiction that will reverberate long after its final page.

Cabell Library PS3601.R345 L56 2009

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Ellen Gilchrist is one of America's most celebrated and respected authors, a classic writer in the tradition of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Elizabeth Spencer. The author of more than twenty books, she was awarded the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan. Now, with her first novel in more than a decade, she returns in top form.

A Dangerous Age tells the story of the women of the Hand family, three cousins in a Southern dynasty rich with history and tradition who are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is a celebration of the strength of these women, and of others like them. In her characteristically clear and direct prose, with its wry, no-nonsense approach to the world and the people who inhabit it, Gilchrist gives voice to women on a collision course with a distant war that, in truth, is never more than a breath away.

Cabell Library PS3557.I34258 D36 2008

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Part homage, part exploration, The Plath Cabinet offers a new window onto Sylvia Plath's world, from her hand-made dolls and her passport to a preserved lock of her hair. The Plath Cabinet is not simply an unparalleled biography: it is a memoir in poems, telling the story of Bowman's relationship to Plath and to poetry. The Plath Cabinet is a must-read for Plath-lovers, for anyone interested in memoir and biography, and for all readers of contemporary poetry.

Cabell Library PS3552.O87555 P63 2009

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In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless hours with an adorable employee of the driving school he attends. And though he is aloof, though caught up in his own actions and in the movement of his own thoughts--he somehow emerges as surprisingly insightful and also very funny. In Toussaint's touching novel, we come to know this character intimately and yet know almost nothing about him. These two extremes, existing together, are at the heart of Toussaint's remarkable style.

Cabell Library PQ2680.O86 A8713 2008

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Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget--his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death.

Cabell Library PS3551.U77 M36 2008

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The Musical Illusionist is a work of strange fiction, the sort most notably practiced by Borges in works like "The Total Library." Traditional concepts of character and plot dwindle almost to the vanishing place, replaced by bizarre anecdotes and conjectures that are located in his postulated Library of Tangents. The experience of reading these stories is closer to that of reading essays than that of traditional stories. They deal in possibility rather than in the definite, couched in Rose's dryly speculative prose. If a Victorian entomologist had chanced to step through a looking glass to a parallel Earth, this might have been the result.

Each story is framed as part of a words-and-pictures Special Exhibition, inviting the reader to examine the grouped stories as much as consuming them. If you're looking for something unusual to read, a flight of fancy that will leave you thinking new thoughts and dreaming strange dreams, this is your book.

Cabell Library PS3618.O7828 M87 2007

Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres—realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political—and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction. This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and challenging world that we live in. These nineteen stories, by some of the most interesting and innovative writers working today, will change your mind about what stories can and should do as they explore the imaginative space between conventional genres. The editors garnered stories from new and established authors in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and also fiction translated from Spanish, Hungarian, and French. The collection features stories from Christopher Barzak, Colin Greenland, Holly Phillips, Rachel Pollack, Vandana Singh, Anna Tambour, Catherynne Valente, Leslie What, and others.

Cabell Library PN6120.2 .I47 2007

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Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

New York City has been the subject of countless novels and short stories throughout its existence, and it finds an eerily able chronicler in Richard Price. The author, well known for his gritty, street-level writing shifts his focus here from Jersey to the Big Apple, exploring the crumbling tenements and lives that are being "transitioned" into something newer, bigger, better, and brighter--whether they want to or not. These changes don't come free, and over the course of the book we see the inevitable fading away of much that is good along with the bad.

The story springs from the killing of a young, eyes-on-the-prize actor whose death causes a media sensation. The plot hews to the familiar lines of mysteries and police procedurals, but invests them with the depth of humanity found in all enduring literature. He shifts the prose to match the rhythms of the moment, but the dialogue is where the book shines. Price's dialogue has been praised by many reviewers and critics, and the pains he takes to represent contemporary slang--and the lives of characters much different from himself--is on clear display here. Lush Life will appeal to readers to who enjoy stories of city life, racial politics, and urban resurrection.

Cabell Library PS3566.R544 L89 2008

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories is exquisitely well-crafted and worth a read, even if you tend to shy away from short stories. Several stories do touch upon the theme of cultural identity explored at length in her later novel The Namesake, but this often serves as background to their ordinary human trials; miscarriage, marital tension, and loss are some of the issues faced by both her Indian and Indian-American characters.

There is a thread of unfulfillment that runs through these stories, whether it is Mrs. Das and her marriage in “Interpreter of Maladies” or young Eliot observing his lonely babysitter in “Mrs. Sen’s,” yet Lahiri avoids injecting their lives with pessimism. Instead, many of her characters display a resiliency to life’s everyday challenges that can be uplifting; one observes, “there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” This sentiment beautifully describes Interpreter of Maladies – perhaps ordinary on the surface, but a work of extraordinary beauty.

Cabell Library PS3562.A316 N36 2003

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

People, places, towns, and islands: all of these are haunted in Diary. Chuck Palahniuk is well-known for his transgressive writing, and this novel came in for harsh criticism on publication, though the book was appreciated by many readers. Looking past the buzz and scorn, Diary is a strange, disturbing, and engaging novel.

The story centers on Misty Marie Wilmot, whose husband Peter recently failed at a suicide attempt, ending up insensate in the hospital. The lives of almost every character in this story are falling apart, and everyone is in some kind of coma or another. The plot would resemble that of a horror novel if graphed on a chart, and Palahniuk has even referred to the novel as such, but calling Diary a horror novel is not unlike calling Crime and Punishment a thriller. While the structure and events are familiar--from boarded up rooms to uncanny skills and curses passed down the years--the author embroiders them with penetrating portraits of people at extremes, determining what they are willing to do in order to save what they love, and how much suffering is necessary to create art.

Cabell Library PS3566.A4554 D53 2003

Faulques, a war photographer, witnessed most of the wars of the end of the 20th Century, but he was never able to capture the photo that would explain the chaos of the universe. Now, as continues to try to understand it, he starts painting a grand circular fresco on the inside wall of a tower on the Mediterranean, disturbed by the memories of a woman he can never forget, and an unexpected visit: a man who wants to kill him.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a Spanish author living near Madrid who has written many novels, some of which have been translated into English.

Cabell Library PQ6666.E765 P5613 2008

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Francisco D’Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son--all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the "Jews of India," the Konkans kneeled before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s sword and before Saint Francis Xavier’s cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics. In 1973 Francisco’s Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot and speaks little. But his mother, who served in the Peace Corps in India, and his uncle Sam (aka Samuel Erasmus D’Sai) are passionate raconteurs who do their best to preserve the family’s Konkan heritage. Friends, allies, and eventually lovers, Sam and Denise feed Francisco’s imagination with proud visions of India and Konkan history.

Tony D'Souza is an award-winning author who was born and raised in Chicago and has since lived in various places around the world. The Konkans is his second novel.

Cabell Library PS3604.S66 K66 2008

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A tale set in Victorian London introduces the characters of a stage magician and detective and his silent sidekick, whose fiendish plot to re-create the apocalyptic prophecies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge threaten the British Empire.

The Somnambulist is British author Jonathan Barnes' first novel.

Cabell Library PR6102.A768 S66 2008

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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

In her first novel, Jhumpa Lahiri addresses themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience with a quiet grace. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are Bengali immigrants living near Boston with their American-born children Sonia and Gogol, the namesake of the title. The novel follows Gogol Ganguli from birth through early adulthood as he struggles with his identity, embodied by an Indian surname, a Russian pet name that was never meant to be his first name, and his desire to be an average American boy. Gogol tries to distance himself from the Bengali immigrant community to which his parents remain tied by changing his name and traveling first to Yale and then to New York, where he works as an architect and dates Maxine, a woman whose upbringing and lifestyle is vastly different from his own. He appears content, yet the question of identity continues to haunt him – “he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own” – and throughout the entire novel Gogol searches for a place where he can truly belong.

Lahiri is a master at conveying so much in the small details and infusing her seemingly ordinary characters with depth and warmth. After reading the novel, check out the critically-acclaimed movie directed by Mira Nair.

Cabell Library PS3562.A316 N36 2003
Cabell Library Media and Reserves DVDs PN1997.2 .N3647354 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

This book is a riveting menagerie of story, from the overarching tale of the novel, to the stories contained within it, to the Hans Christian Anderson tale referenced in the title. The co-authors both contributed to the story, with Mignola doing all of the illustrations in his characteristic fantastical Expressionist style. The prose is lucid, with a generally dark tone, leaving the highs and lows of the story to move the reader.

The setting of the story is an alternate Europe, during and directly after World War I. Events and places share many similarities with our world, but not all. Lord Baltimore is a former English officer suffering from the shocks of war, as well as an encounter with the titular vampire. The secondary characters all knew Baltimore at various times in life, and they meet in a tavern to tell stories about him and about their own lives. As it turns out, they have all experienced supernatural events that make them more liable to believe the narrative of Lord Baltimore's tragic life, and the ghastly plague that spread from the trenches of World War I to ravage Europe like the Red Death of Poe. In telling their stories, they come to grips with the damaging effects of evil and strengthen their resolve to do what is necessary to aid their own steadfast tin soldier.

Cabell Library PS3613.I38 B35 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

A fictionalized account of the murder of Emmett Till, Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine is an engaging novel about the lives of the people involved. Spanning the many decades that followed the murder, this story personalizes the heartache suffered by everyone involved, from the family of Armstrong Todd (the fictional stand-in for Emmett Till) to the power brokers of the Mississippi Delta to the man who put a bullet in his stomach to the descendants of every person involved. Campbell has a knack for bringing her characters to life in all their beauty and ugliness. No one, murderer or victim, gets away unexamined in this work.

Whether it was Campbell's intention or not (she died in 2006), this book is the very definition of thought-provoking. Abstract ideas of discrimination and oppression have almost no role in this book; instead the reader experiences the thoughts and feelings of people living in difficult circumstances. To say that black Americans have historically been oppressed is one thing, but it is entirely another to watch the destruction of lives in ways large and small. All the novel's black characters struggle to survive the injustice of Jim Crow, to escape it in the North, only to realize that the legacy of oppression is inescapable, and can mean destruction even when victory is in sight. All the characters -- white or black, male or female, rich or poor, young or old -- are forever damaged by the things they do and that are done to them as a result of who they are. In the end, however, most of them find a place of strength to draw from in order to handle life's trials.

Cabell Library PS3553.A4395 Y68 1992

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

The comic strip Boondocks ran in various locations from 1996 to 2006, at which point the strip ceased production, possibly for good. Subject matter included race, politics, religion, and all things African-American. The strip often followed current events closely, sparking intense debate and anger in many quarters, particularly with its intensely political turn after 9/11, and it was regularly pulled from or edited by many newspapers during its run. It stood out on the comics page, both for its largely African-American cast and for the vigor with which McGruder regularly laid into prominent politicians, media moguls, and self-appointed champions of Right.

All the Rage is a collection of selected 2003-2005 strips; articles about the strip and interviews with McGruder; and strips that caused controversy and/or were pulled. It comes packed with plenty of actual strips, along with enough behind-the-scenes information to give you a broad take on the comic. If you've never read Boondocks, which has since become an animated show, this isn't a bad place to start. Note that readers sensitive to cussing, racial epithets, or frank discussion of racial inequality may not find this book to be their cup of tea.

Cabell Library PN6728.B633 M34 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Li-Young Lee is a poet of the core elements of human experience, shunning the transitory. His work encompasses loneliness, fatherhood, love, the inner life of children, and many other experiences familiar to readers of today, yesterday, or tomorrow. The poems of Book of My Nights are not very long as a rule, focusing with spare language on the things one tends to ruminate about in the hours between dusk and dawn.

On the death of his brother, in "Black Petal":

Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story

On the concerns of a father, in "Words for Worry":

Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.

Worry trimmed the child's nails before
singing him to sleep.

On youth and mortality, in "Stations of the Sea":

Once forsaken, I remain
hidden in the dust, a mortal threshold
unearthed by crying.

Crying, my body turns to dark petals.

The poet has been well-laurelled in his life as a poet, winning multiple Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Perhaps the most prominent of Asian American poets, a collection of interviews entitled Breaking the Alabaster Jar was published in 2006. His poems have been anthologized in major works like the Norton Anthology of American Literature, signaling both provisional inclusion in the oft-debated canon and the regard in which his work is held.

Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 B66 2001

Cabell Library PS3562.E35438 Z46 2006 Breaking the Alabaster Jar

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

This collection of short stories is a representative offering, showcasing Murakami's skills from his beginnings as an author in the late '70s to today. Shadowy jazz clubs, bizarre metaphysical conditions, high and low culture, Japanese work culture, political violence, nameless and subtly attractive women: all of his recurring obsessions appear here. The book has a loose, freewheeling feel, and is a fine place for a Murakami beginner. Read a few paragraphs of a story, and if you don't like it, move on to the next. Diverse as this collection is, you will eventually find something you like.

"Tony Takitani" chronicles the life a Japanese jazz man's son, what his drive and focus brings him, and how he eventually learns about loneliness. "The Ice Man" is a story about love between a woman of flesh and a man of ice, and the progression of their relationship as she learns to live in his icy world. "Birthday Girl" tells the story of the circumstances surrounding a young woman's birthday wish, but not the wish itself. "Nausea 1979" describes a Biblical period of regurgitation that may or may not be connected to the protagonist's amorous adventures with his friends' wives and girlfriends.

The book also contains two pieces of writing for those interested in Murakami as an artist. "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" is a disconcerting fable about the author's view of his reception by the Japanese literary establishment. The reader knows the truth behind the story because Murakami tells us about it in the introduction, which is itself a nice essay about his take on writing, short fiction, and the purpose of stories.

Cabell Library PL856.U673 A23 2006

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

Not for the faint of heart, The Savage Detectives is a dreamlike and gritty tale of the fictional Visceral Realism poetry movement in 1970s Mexico City. The story follows the elusive ringleaders of this motley group of young writers – Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima – on their quixotic mission to find Cesárea Tinajero, the first true Visceral Realist. By turns ponderous and gripping, The Savage Detectives is an absorbing novel that is not to be missed, if only to experience Bolaño’s style and Wimmer’s superb translation.

Told through the voice of a seventeen-year-old law school dropout and newly-minted member of the group, Juan García Madero, the novel begins with an account of the events leading up New Year’s Eve 1975, when he, Arturo, and Ulises flee Mexico City under inauspicious circumstances. At this point the story changes abruptly to a series of narratives from over fifty characters, spanning more than twenty years and several continents. Ostensibly about what happens to Arturo and Ulises after that fateful New Year’s Eve, these pieces also function as haunting, intimate portraits of the narrators themselves. The shortest part of the novel then returns to New Year’s Day 1976, with García Madero’s diary entries chronicling their fateful trip into the Sonora Desert and to the conclusion of their literary quest.

PQ8098.12.O38 D4813 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

In this debut novel, Austin Grossman writes of the lives, loves, and traumas of superheroes. The story doesn't take place in the well-worn worlds of Marvel or DC, but the characters are all types (or combinations thereof) recognizable to anyone who knows comics: the near-invulnerable man, the mythological figure, the half-man/half-machine, the feral fighter, and so on. And what would a novel of heroes be without supervillains? The two viewpoint characters are Dr. Impossible, evil mastermind par excellence, and Fatale, a female cyborg with a cloudy past who has been asked to join The Champions, a super-group analogous to the JLA or the Avengers.

This rousing yet thoughtful novel is a beautiful counterpoint between the main characters. On one page the reader encounters Fatale's frustrations over not being able to sit in chairs that won't support her armor, and on the next Dr. Impossible is lamenting his tendency to leave crucial details of his doomsday devices unplanned until the last minute. Grossman plays his characters' agonies straight, exploring the psychology and lives of people set forever apart from the rest of humanity. Serious takes on the world of comics have been done before, in fiction and in comics themselves, but the author brings a deft hand at characterization to the project.

As much as this is a story about super-powered people, it's a story about humans in opposition, forced to live out their lives in circumstances they believe they don't deserve, or in other cases circumstances they believe is their due as the best of society. Grossman's style is economical and transparent, aside from occasional rhetorical flourishes that neatly match the action of the story. This novel will be a thrill for you if you enjoy comics and a fast-paced story that still takes time to explore the lives of its characters.

Cabell Library PS3607.R666 S66 2007

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Hank Thompson, protagonist of Charlie Huston's slam-bang neo-noir, has not had an easy life. From a baseball accident that ended a promising career to a car crash that left him unable to drive to the bottles of booze that fill his apartment, this strangely gentle man never really caught a break. He was doing OK, though, until his neighbor left town and gave Hank his cat to watch... and the key hidden at the bottom of the cat's litter box. Various people come looking for the key, and that's when the fun begins.

The novel stands up next to James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia or Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, in both the dark settings and the violence. The seedy world of the characters includes beatings, shootings, robbery, torture, and worse yet. In this environment, it's not a question of whether a good man will go bad, but the manner in which it will happen, and how bad he'll go. Huston's narration and use of the first-person viewpoint is gripping, conveying the thoughts and fears of Hank Thompson very well. The plot twists and turns to some extent, but the action and violence of this story are what will keep you reading until 2 a.m.

Cabell Library PS3608.U855 C38 2004

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Election is elegant, funny, and eminently readable at 200 pages, and it made me want to read more of Tom Perrotta's work. The story is an engrossing stew of angst, backstabbing, politicking, jealousy, ennui, and sex, all set in the midst of a high school election. For various reasons the election turns out to be unusually hotly contested, and readers get to watch the lives of various students, teachers, and parents implode and expand in a variety of colorful ways.

Perrotta's style will quickly draw you into the narrative, and the reader's viewpoint rotates between several different characters. The events look much different, depending on who's talking at any given time, whether it's the overly entitled Tracy Flick or the hapless Mr. M. Among all the electioneering and typical high school drama, there's also a substantial amount of sleeping around and inappropriate relationships, teacher-student and otherwise. Perrotta presents his characters as humans, warts and all, and these entanglements are handled neither with simple finger-wagging nor with Nabokovian glee. This novel also inspired a film adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick.

Cabell Library PS3566.E6948 E43 1998 (novel)
Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1997 .E44 2006 (film)

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby is a tour de force among graphic novels, regarded by many comics scholars and aficionados as an instant classic. The story follows Toland Polk, a young white man growing up and coming to terms with his homosexuality in southern Alabama during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Along the way we meet his friends and family and other members of the town where he was born, each with their own story to tell.

Cruse’s storytelling is sure and restrained, and Toland’s journey is neither caricature nor pity party: he’s a young man with flaws, and you get to see him at his best and his worst. Cruse’s art is a fine example of mature draftsmanship -- reminiscent of R. Crumb’s crosshatching or Thomas Ott’s finely detailed scratchboard style. At the same time, the characters have a rounded, cartoonish quality that’s both amusing and disturbing, which in some way softens the blow when Toland witnesses horrible events, from beatings to knifings to lynchings.

Gay Liberation and the struggle for LGBT rights runs parallel in many respects to the history of the struggle for civil rights for people of all races. Cruse shows this in many ways, from the direct parallels between all the unrest of the 1960s and the gay rights struggles that followed directly on their heels. It's impossible to say when and how gay rights might have developed with the Civil Rights Movement, but as it is, the one owes a great debt to the examples of passion and pride set by the great black leaders of the 1960s, from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X.

Cabell Library PN6727.C74 S86 1995

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Mortal Love is a fascinating novel that spans the lives of various poets and artists and musicians over a hundred years as they encounter a mysterious woman. For each of them, she ("Larkin Meade" in the present day) is both lover and muse, inspiring in each the most powerful work they will ever produce. Elizabeth Hand's writing is densely sensuous, her words aptly evoking the artistry of her subjects, and almost poetic in its intensity. Many historical figures appear in this work, including some notable Decadents and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The novel's viewpoint switches repeatedly between characters living at different times. It takes a little while to get used to these changes, and sometimes the thread of the narrative almost passes out of prose and into poetry. That is to say, if you let yourself go and allow the story wash over you, you may find it easier to navigate some of the changes. The story, and the many twists and turns it takes through art, love, madness, folklore, obsession, and mystery are well worth your time.

Cabell Library PS3558.A4619 M67 2004

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

Yes, The Time Traveler’s Wife is about time travel. And at its center is the love story of Henry, the charismatic time-traveling librarian, and his wife Clare. Yet to categorize this strange, lovely novel as fantasy or romance would be somewhat misleading. It is certainly not a love story of the classic boy-meets-girl variety. Indeed, Henry DeTamble first meets Clare when she is six, and he is nearly middle-aged, swept back in time during one of his involuntary time traveling episodes. Years later (or earlier?), after many travels to Clare’s childhood, they meet again. As Clare’s life progresses in a (normal) linear fashion and Henry flip-flops through time, the narrative leads one to question the ideas of causality, coincidence, destiny, and fate. It all appears to be a Möbius strip, as Clare tells Henry when she finally meets his present-day self; does knowing about the future then cause one to change it?

Despite the time travel episodes and flashbacks, Niffenegger does an excellent job of moving the narrative forward with enough semblance of chronology. Passages are clearly labeled with the dates and the characters’ ages; while initially confusing, one soon learns how to read the organization of the story within the time travel framework. Indeed, much of the beauty of this novel is from the use of this compelling, bizarre context to explore the very ordinary, human themes of love, marriage, and death. Despite some first novel flaws (too long, too much), The Time Traveler’s Wife is a compelling, haunting read worth picking up before the movie arrives in cinemas.

Cabell Library PS3564.I362 T56 2003

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs and Reference Collection Coordinator

Three Junes is a quiet character study of the McLeod family, told at three points in time over the span of ten years. Each section stands well on its own; indeed, “Collies,” the first part of the book, won the 1999 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. Yet when read together, the stories complement each other and serve to provide multi-faceted portraits of the characters; the reader not only views Paul, the McLeod patriarch, through the lens of his own narrative, but from his son Fenno’s perspective as well.

The novel begins with Paul’s trip to Greece as a recent widower, during which he reminisces about his somewhat flawed, yet very loving, marriage to Maureen. Fenno’s story meanders between his life in New York during the time of Maureen’s illness and his homecoming to Scotland several years later, precipitated by Paul’s death. The third section studies the McLeod men from the eyes of an outsider, an acquaintance of Paul’s who also meets Fenno and one of his brothers through rather unusual circumstances. Yet rather than a too-coincidental and tidy ending, Fern’s impressions lend another dimension to the McLeod men and serve to underscore the themes of choice and ambiguity present in the lives of Glass’s very human characters.

Cabell Library PS3607.L37 T48 2002

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a fast, gripping science fiction novel that tries to figure out what the costs are when war never ends, and what that might mean in outer space. If you think Star Wars or Star Trek when you think of SF, this book will broaden your mind. The action takes place on various space ships traveling throughout the galaxy at relativistic speeds, so when the characters return to Earth or their command posts, a hundred years may have passed, though they have aged only a couple years subjectively. The protagonist, one William Mandella, suffers all the agonies that you can imagine someone enduring over his centuries of military service, watching himself become ever more alienated from humanity as it changes and evolves into something new entirely -- and he remains fundamentally a 20th century man.

This novel was published in 1974, and it would have been impossible to read it back then without being reminded of Vietnam. U.S. veterans of that war often returned home to find their fellow Americans much different than they had been when they left, and that sense of dislocation is palpable throughout the book. From the moment it begins, the characters removed from the comforts of Earth, this novel shows you the world that interstellar travelers (military or otherwise) would experience and asks what implications it might have for their humanity.

Cabell Library PS3558.A353 F6

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Long before the movie version of Wonder Boys catapulted Tobey Maguire into the public eye, way before he published his Pulitzer-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, back when he was only 25, Michael Chabon published his first novel, a slim coming-of-age story called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It brought him fame and a good reputation at an age when most writers are still diligently laboring in the vineyards of the literary and little magazines. It is a funny, moving book set during the summer when newly graduated college student Art Bechstein tries to figure out who he is and what to do with his life. In the process he winds up with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, gets involved with the Pittsburgh underworld at levels high and low, and has a series of pleasantly picaresque adventures.

This novel will appeal to readers who enjoyed The Secret History or The Catcher in the Rye, or really any good novel about what it means to be young and in love with the world. Chabon's prose is both exuberant and smooth in this book, telling the story with a minimum of fuss. Pittsburgh is on display in every chapter, a real presence and not just a generic setting, making this the kind of novel that inhabitants might point to if asked "what's it like to live here?" It's also a fun novel to read if you've only read Chabon's later work, partly for the pleasure of the book itself, partly for the pleasure of anticipating how he came to grow in later years.

Cabell Library PS3553.H15 M97 1989

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

City of Glass is a short, strange scrap of a detective novel that will leave you wondering what happened when it's over, and whether or not you've been had. It is the first of three novels Auster published in the mid-'80s that are collectively known as the New York Trilogy, all of which both serve as and are about mysteries. Fans of Chandler, Christie, Doyle and Queen, as well as latter-day practitioners of the form, will be able to discern many of the traditional elements of a mystery here: threats, private detectives, beautiful women, stakeouts, elusive targets, mysterious phone calls. And yet, everything is different.

The action takes place at a remove, following the actions of the protagonist, Quinn, himself a mystery writer. He becomes embroiled in a "case" when he is mistakenly identified as one Paul Auster, a purported detective. Later in the book Quinn meets Auster, who turns out to be a pleasant, helpful literary novelist. As Opus of Bloom County fame would have said, "Mr. Auster, are you funning with me?" Auster's answer, undoubtedly, would be "yes."

Games and clever language are central to this novel, and the story owes as much to Pynchon or DeLillo as to to any of the above-named mystery writers. This is a captivating mystery, but don't read it expecting to be kept anxiously waiting to find out at the end if the butler did it in the study with a nine-iron. Auster raises many questions in City of Glass, not all of which he answers, and at the end you will be left wondering which part of the novel was the real story -- and if you will ever find out.

Cabell Library PS3551.U77 C5 1985

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Edward Gorey was a strange, strange man who created odd, unclassifiable books (novels? comics? nonsense?) graced by decidedly weird illustrations. Aside from his books, his work appeared in many other places: the opening sequence of the PBS series Mystery, set designs for various theatrical productions, on lunchboxes, on the covers of other authors' books. His illustrations are generally very well suited to the works they accompany, and so even if you've never sat down with one of his books, it's easy to feel familiar with his work.

Prior to reading Amphigorey, my exposure to Gorey had been mainly to his work as an illustrator. This collection, which anthologizes fifteen different books (1953-1965), broadened my understanding and appreciation of Gorey as both a writer and an artist. It opens with The Unstrung Harp, the tale of one Mr. Earbrass' experience writing a novel, and it is better in many regards than a good three-quarters of all other books devoted to that subject. The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a macabre alphabet book, one of his many rhyming/verse works, illustrating each letter with the death of a child in a different manner. The Bug Book is the simple tale of the life of some very happy bugs, and how they deal with sudden appearance of a large and unpleasant bug. The West Wing is one of the oddest in the volume, a wordless book that may or may not have a narrative, and in which a house appears to be the central character. Taken together, the works in this collection are enjoyable, diverse, and fun, and they may challenge you to think in new ways about text and illustration, and what the relationship between the two is or ought to be.

Cabell Library PS3513.O614 A8

Reviewed by Dave Morrison, Building Manager, Cabell Library

“Sometimes you have to lose yourself…before you can find anything.”
Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds) speaking to Ed Gentry (Jon Voight) in John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance

This fall I will be experiencing for the first time class V white water rapids while shooting down a remote and treacherous West Virginia river. The above mentioned and not-so-well-remembered scene from the film, coupled with the excitement of my upcoming adventure, had me scurrying to the fourth floor stacks of JBC in search of James Dickey’s classic survival novel Deliverance, which I devoured eagerly over a recent weekend. Prior to reading the book, which happened to be an antiquated and tattered volume from 1970, all my knowledge of this story had been gathered from multiple viewings of the movie over the years. I knew of no one else who had tackled the original written version either.

When mentioning my interest in reading Deliverance, almost everyone familiar with the movie recalled the famous scene of an acutely afflicted, yet grossly talented banjo player hammering out a timeless battle, or musical collaboration, whichever way you choose to look at it, between the coarser side of human nature and what we would consider the civilized world, represented by a cheerful, guitar-picking Ronny Cox. The infamous Ned Beatty scene was almost always mentioned too. Both of these and many of the movie’s other images originally appear in the novel and for the reason that Dickey himself played a large part in making the film, these scenes are recreated quite accurately from book to film.

The story in the novel follows four middle-class, suburban men setting out for a weekend adventure in a rustic and not so friendly region of Georgia, intent on exploring the wild Cahulawasee River using canoes and little backwoods experience. Their zealous and naive approach to the area, the river and its sparse population of “hillfolk” create the perfect environment for a weekend gone wrong. Violence, survival and murder are the topics throughout and never let up to the end. My goal in reading this book was to uncover deeper character insights, to get a better understanding of the survival and self-analysis side of men that Lewis makes reference to, and to be taken on a rowdy, dangerous and desperate literary experience. That is exactly what I found as I paddled wildly through the story of Deliverance.

Cabell Library PS3554.I32 D4 1986

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Fun Home is an autobiographical comic written in a nuanced, literary style, intermingling the stories of the author's coming to grips with her sexual identity and her closeted father's untimely death. Bechdel, author of Dykes to Watch Out For, draws in a style that meshes comfortably with her narrative, neither outshining nor underwhelming it. To consider this comic simple autobiography, however, would be a disservice. Through its pages one sees the trials and tribulations suffered by generations of queer America, both in the cities and in the small towns of America.

Fun Home will appeal to all readers who enjoy thoughtful literature. Bechdel's work is clever, emotionally gripping in a way that moves beyond simple feelings such as joy or anger and into the strange sensations (or lack thereof) that arise at life's crossroads. She includes many snippets of other authors' works when the characters are reading, using their texts to replicate their various epiphanies, from Camus to Colette.

Cabell Library PN6727.B3757 Z46 2006

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Bones of the Moon is a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of fantasy, one that begins in a wholly real Manhattan and ends up traveling through Rondua, a land strange and whimsical enough to rival Poictesme or the Dreamlands or Neverland. The intrusion of the strange in this novel is gradual, the kind of slow seepage one finds in Shirley Jackson or Robert Aickman, and readers will find themselves believing in the thoroughly real world of the protagonists as easily as they will the adventures set in the land of Rondua. It’s difficult to talk in detail about the characters and the plot without giving the entire story away, but suffice it to say that everything in the book, however fantastic, develops from a major turning point in the life of Cullen James, Bones’ protagonist.

This short novel will appeal to readers who like both thoughtful fantasy and domestic tales. A great part of the story is concerned with the relationship between Cullen and her husband Danny, and the minutiae of their lives, albeit subtly influenced by the fantastic. Carroll, an American-born author residing in Vienna, has won notable literary awards in the U.S., Britain, France, and elsewhere. His skills are on fine display here, from his eerily apt descriptions for imaginary geographies to his nuanced descriptions of Cullen James’ reactions to the events that overtake her life like a sudden storm.

Bones of the Moon is available in VCU’s Special Collections, and other Carroll stories can be found in the circulating collection, from the surreal adventures of architect Harry Radcliffe (Outside the Dog Museum) to a comic battle between Go(o)d and Chaos (Glass Soup).

Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives PS3553.A7646 B6 1988

Cabell Library PS3553.A7646 O87 1992 (Outside the Dog Museum)
Cabell Library PS3553.A7646 G57 2005 (Glass Soup)

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

A literary historical/horror novel, Perfume rose to the top of bestseller lists around the world when it was released in 1985. It follows the exploits of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a wretched, misbegotten boy who rises from a life in the gutters of Paris on the near-magical abilities of his nose to separate scents from one another. Given the hardships to which he was exposed in childhood, it comes as no surprise when Grenouille enters adulthood lacking anything resembling normative morals and acts as he sees fit in order to satisfy his nose. The historical aspect of the novel is enthralling; Suskind grounds the action with concrete period detail, and he provides fascinating descriptions of the French perfume industry of the 18th century. The language of Perfume is often overwhelmingly rich, all in the service of trying to describe Grenouille's world of scents, which few readers could otherwise hope to comprehend.

This novel is a unique, extraordinary work, portraying a criminal mind without peer or restraint. On the one hand, Grenouille's actions increase in their daring and verve along lines familiar from criminology. On the other, he is a creature as evil and alien to most readers as any monster from the annals of science fiction. Perfume is enjoyable for its dense, florid style, and for the panache with which Suskind tells his clever story, but be warned that this is a dark, disturbing novel.

Cabell Library PT2681.U74 P313 1986

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Harvey Pekar is one of the people who helped begin the gradual broadening of acceptable subject matter for comics in the U.S. Starting in the 1960s, a number of comics creators began producing "underground comics" -- comics which had nothing to do with the typical subject matter of comic books. Harvey Pekar entered this arena in 1976 with his autobiographical series American Splendor.

This volume contains stories culled from recent decades of American Splendor. One of the most striking things about the book that's visible right away is the variation in the artwork. Pekar is a writer, not an artist, and has frequently been quoted as having said he "couldn't draw a straight line." Various artists have illustrated his stories over the years, and this book is a showcase of styles, from the rounded, almost kanji-like drawings of Frank Stack to the thin line realism of Joe Zabel.

The stories themselves vary quite a bit in nature, but all revolve around Pekar's life in Cleveland as a file clerk at a V.A. hospital. They have all the pluses and minuses of stories of anybody's daily life, but in each Pekar finds something meaningful to say that elevates it above the status of mere episode. The author is known for being downbeat and combative, and many of these stories deal with the pains and anxieties of real life, with no positive resolution. If you enjoy the fiction of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, or perhaps Charles Bukowski, you might enjoy these stories of Harvey Pekar's life.

Cabell Library PN6727.P44 B47 2005

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

This slender, haunting novel follows Sumire, a typically strange Murakami protagonist who wanders through life trying to be a writer until she falls passionately in love with Miu, a sophisticated businesswoman. The story has all the existential questioning of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye or Donna Tartt's The Secret History. The narrator is "K" (surely no relation), who fell in love with Sumire when they were in college together. The narrative follows Sumire as she becomes attracted to Miu, goes to work for her, and eventually travels Europe with her, ending up on an unnamed Greek island where things go horribly awry. It's a pleasure to watch the intersection of cultures as the characters come together in Greece, both because of Murakami's keen eye for the real and for the crisp, clear prose of this translation by Philip Gabriel.

As in Murakami's other novels, the nature of reality is plastic in this otherwise mainstream novel. By hewing so close to reality, the author leaves the true nature of the events reported for the reader to decide. Is what he describes reality, fantasy? The subtle changes he rings on a world we think we know, and the stealthy unfolding of the strange events, will lull you into complacency, so that when the real becomes surreal (unreal?), it's difficult to look back and indentify the point at which things began to change. At just over two hundred pages, this focused, spare novel is a great place for readers new to Murakami to start.

Cabell Library PL856.U673 S8713 2001

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Francine Prose's Guided Tours of Hell consists of two stories in one slim volume, one ("Guided Tours of Hell") a novella, the other ("Three Pigs in Five Days") more of a short novel. Each story is, in its way, a gray and gloomy tale, revolving around or under the shadows of Kafka, the Holocaust, and the history of Modern Europe. Each story unerringly traces the caprices of ego and vanity, and in the end presents characters who make as good, vain, and greedy choices as people ever make.

"Guided Tours of Hell" follows the lower-echelon playwright Landau, observing his thoughts and actions as he tours a Nazi death camp as part of a Kafka symposium. He engages in a struggle (often purely internal) with a much lauded and fought-over Holocaust survivor who after liberation wrote a series of gripping memoirs and lived a life of unrestrained excess. The characters here calculate, suffer, and fall in and out of alliances with and lust for each other as they try to make their way through the world's most hideous field trip.

"Three Pigs in Five Days" tells the story of Nina, sent to Paris by Leo, her lover and boss, to write a travel story about cozy nooks and corners of the city. The story quickly takes a turn for the surreal when she realizes that the hotel she was assigned was a former house of ill repute, and from there Prose takes us through the extreme series of mental gymnastics Nina must perform in order to determine whether Leo is trying to abandon her or simply play with her head. She encounters a colorful range of characters, from neo-Nazis to gallery curators to tourists bound for the Paris catacombs. Through it all she wonders how what she sees is conditioned by her experiences with and desire for Leo.

Cabell Library PS3566.R68 G85 1997

Reviewed by Allison Titus, Library Specialist I

Lisa Lewis' poems are sweeping things that read like short stories. They remind me of Aimee Bender's short fiction: composed with a carefully crafted simplicity; conversational with lyric tendencies; hinged not on sharp fragments but instead on sort of inverted moments: the language is manipulated to surprise but always remains conversational in tone. There is a simplicity within these poems—sometimes conjured by a series of parallel sentences and the repetition of totemic words—but the poems aren’t simple. They move ever outward in gathering arcs to relate a progression of events or objects or ephemera. Ideas and experiences are linked one after the other to create a vast container of images, yet the poems manage to feel instinctual in these accumulations. These are natural, complicated meanderings that trace a pattern to the core. Lewis’ melancholy is a plainspoken, energetic melancholy, and she offers devastating observations that feel right on—as absolute as waking, where ordinary truths turn monumental but are not contrived-profound.

From "Animal Bodies":
I knew how animals play/ in the rivers and the locked rooms after we've fallen asleep./ I knew dark moved to light and light moved to dark, I wanted/ to try talking about it, what if I said, here are my hands, bird, where are your claws?

From "The Lamed Mare":
But the past doesn't die. Doesn't/even fade, not much, for all the paper/stapled over memory, like those fly-specked/bulletins hung in every barn, phone numbers/of blacksmiths, Labrador puppies for sale.

From "Drought":
It rained/last year, it rained all year, I believed/my sorrow would never end, but it slipped/ through itself like a knotted thread. Too much river is no worse than too little./it's just that I'd thought, as anyone would,/that drowning was the way to die, not/sighing like a spark struck into thin air./

From "The Hummingbird":
It thought the light/meant the wind should be closer, the tree limbs'/tips, the evening sky, whatever comforts a bird/flies home to…Hummingbirds never stop flying, their thready legs/won't brace them up, or maybe their feet won't lock/around grass blades, their wings' pulse treading /each side of their hearts. I could hardly imagine/a bird so small; I could hardly imagine a life/so hard no rest belongs there./

There is remarkable inclusiveness to Lewis' speculation—room enough for her to try out multitudes and variations with "or maybes" –and still to keep us by her side, guessing and hoping to know and relieved at certain moments when something fundamental gets stated. Lewis allows us to witness her thoughts unwinding to some place solid even when that includes hesitation. The poems in Silent Treatment offer no sentimentality, no false gestures.

Cabell Library PS3562.E9535 S5 1998

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a dreamy, introspective novel of 20th century Japan. Multiple plotlines compete in the book, occurring in different times and places, and to highlight one at the expense of another would be a shame. Contents include missing cats, Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, toupee manufacture, Soviet gulags, psychic prostitution, and the troubled marriage of Toru and Kumiko Okada. The novel's tone is reminiscent of both Raymond Carver and Raymond Chandler, which is understandable, given Murakami's affection for both. Much of the novel is set in a 1980s Japan at odds with many depictions of the country at the time, eliding the endless workdays of salarymen and focusing instead on the surreality of urban life. While the novel is intriguing and well-written, I found it oddly uncompelling and spent weeks sporadically reading it. Nonetheless, I definitely look forward to reading more of his work.

Cabell Library PL856.U673 N4513 1997

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Angela Carter's stories are Byzantine, richly layered affairs. She draws on fairy tale themes and writes in a style that could easily be called "purple" or "hothouse," if not for its intense focus. Some, like this 1978 collection's eponymous tale, are actual retellings of well-known classics like "Bluebeard" or "Beauty and the Beast." The violence and sexuality that Carter sees inherent in nature always lurk just around the corner here, if not in plain view. "The Erl-King" is an absolute tour-de-force, revisiting Romantic views of nature and creation even as it tears them down. "Wolf-Alice" is a fine conclusion to the volume, pulling together themes from many folk tales and weaving them together with a postmodern Gothic sensibility. It's no wonder that Carter's stories, continually subverting authority and questioning who is in control, are regarded by critics as highly feminist.

If you're hungry for more after finishing The Bloody Chamber, VCU Libraries has much of Carter's oeuvre, from her influential book of essays, The Sadeian Woman : an Exercise in Cultural History, to her surreal novel The War of Dreams. Carter is one of many noted 20th century fabulists, and the reader who enjoys her may also enjoy the fiction of Jonathan Carroll, Shirley Jackson, or Steven Millhauser.

Cabell Library PR6053.A73 B49

Cabell Library PQ2063 .S3 C34 1979 (The Sadeian woman)
Cabell Library PR6053.A73 W3 1974 (The War of Dreams)

Reviewed by Patricia Selinger, Head of Preservation

Everyday people in modern, middle-class England and the far reaching impact of decisions people make are common themes in novels by Joanna Trollope. Brother & Sister explores the issues surrounding adoption through David and Nathalie, a brother and sister adopted from different mothers into a family. When Nathalie decides to search for her birthmother, and cajoles David into searching for his also, they and their families change as they work through anger, abandonment, victimization, forgiveness, and intimacy. What does it mean to be a family? What is a mother? Who am I really? Who do I “belong” to? What is “mine”? These are questions Trollope’s characters must answer for themselves. Her characters and their issues seem very realistic. No one is perfect and their flaws are believable. People who might appear weak have inner strength that is not always evident. Likewise, those who appear strong have weaknesses. The plot moves with a nice combination of introspection and action. This story will hold your attention from beginning to end.

Cabell Library PR6070.R57 B76 2004

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Night Picnic: Poems is a fine 2001 collection by Charles Simic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yugoslavian-born poet best known for surreal, often dark work. The poems presented here are clearly the work of an older poet, confident in himself and in his work. The poems' narratives are stronger than those of Jackstraws, his deeply imagistic 1999 collection, and more relaxed than the tight, spare pieces prevalent earlier in his career, as represented in 1982's Austerities.

Much of Simic's poetry in the past has sprung from the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Eastern Europe. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, his somewhat older Polish contemporary, Simic has done much to bring the rhythms and life the "Other Europe" to the English-speaking world. Night Picnic is clearly Simic's work, from the "butchery of the innocent" to the confused wanderers of nameless cities:

… they do not see anyone,
Nor do they catch sight of themselves
In dusty store windows
Drifting in the company of white clouds.

Many of the poems here are playful, and that playfulness often appears in the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated objects: "[t]wo pebbles from the grave of a rock star, / [a] small, grinning windup monkey." Here more than ever before, the poet takes an earthy delight in the rituals of human love and lust. While still recognizably the work of Charles Simic, many of these poems read like the work of a man whose burdens have been, if not lifted, then at least lightened.

Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 N54 2001

Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 J33 1999 (Jackstraws)
Cabell Library PS3569.I4725 A95 1982 (Austerities)

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is an Aladdin's cave of treasures, containing more than thirty short stories, poems, vignettes, and literary forms in between. From a novella about a modern-day demigod's travels in Scotland, to a short story about some far-out exchange students, to a set of poetic instructions for traversing fairy tales, Neil Gaiman's creations are above all stories. Even at their most clever and postmodern, his works have the authentic ring of tales passed on at campfires, or shared by strangers waiting for a plane.

"October in the Chair" is a standout tale of childhood sorrow, worthy of its dedication to Ray Bradbury, and is one of several pieces here dealing with young people. Gaiman's pleasure in playing in other writers' sandboxes is clear in the Arthur Conan Doyle/H. P. Lovecraft mashup "A Study in Emerald," as well as in "The Problem of Susan," wherein he gives C. S. Lewis' Susan Pevensie a much-deserved second look. "Bitter Grounds" tells the story of one man's journey to transfiguration in New Orleans. Gaiman's exquisite command of myth is also on display in this collection, from the titular creature of "Sunbird" to the cleverly deployed figures of Northern European myth in "The Monarch of the Glen." Many of these pieces are stories about stories, with all the literary embroidery that entails, from various framing devices (the book's introduction, for one...) to the commentary on the conflict between realism and the Gothic that is "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire."

Many pieces in this volume wend through dark territories - some gruesome, others purely disturbing. While plenty of these "short fictions and wonders" will delight and amaze, Fragile Things is not for the faint-hearted. If you want more after reading it, check out American Gods, a novel featuring the protagonist of this collection's "The Monarch of the Glen," or try one of the collected volumes of Gaiman's landmark Sandman comic series.

Cabell Library PR6057.A319 F73 2006

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

The works of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance dramatist, essayist, musical collaborator, novelist, and poet Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) comprise a crucial record of the African American experience in the first half of the 20th Century. Hughes' poetry from the 1920s and 1930s especially captures the tenor of Harlem voices, allowing the vibrancy of living speech to emerge from the printed page. Defying the simple caricatures of black speech that often prevailed in American literature in previous decades, Hughes' poetry collections -- especially The Weary Blues (1926), The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) -- created a space in which the true voices of Harlem could tell their own stories. Using everyday words and rhythms from the voices around him, and mixing echoes of the extraordinary energy of the Jazz music that was becoming more intricate, expressive, and irrefutable, Hughes' poetry constitutes an immortal oral history of one of the most important times and places in American history. "I've known rivers," Hughes writes in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins," and the voices of Hughes' poems, like the rivers he celebrates, have become part of that ancient wisdom.

The poetry of Langston Hughes has often been set to music, and his poem cycle "Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz" will be performed Friday evening, February 23, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. at the VCU Singleton Center for the Performing Arts by The Langston Hughes Project, a presentation by The Ron McCurdy Quartet and Dr. Diane Richardson.

Cabell Library PS3515.U274 A6 1990

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Perhaps no other novel from the nineteenth century -- and perhaps no other novel in the history of American literature -- is as controversial as Uncle Tom's Cabin, by anti-slavery activist and novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even in its own time, the novel was extraordinarily divisive -- though not for reasons that 21st Century readers would expect. When first published in 1852, Stowe's depiction of the general brutalities of slavery, and of the particular inhuman acts of slave-owners, was seen by many white readers across the nation as excessive and improbable. And as the historical moment that incited Stowe to write her novel receded (the growth of the abolition movement, the Civil War), critical focus shifted to the depiction of the title character, a slave whose fortitude -- or perhaps docility, as is often argued -- enables him to endure the gradually worsening conditions of slavery, as, through a series of bargains, he is sold to lesser and lesser beneficent masters. Yet Stowe's Uncle Tom -- a name that now represents passive acceptance of unspeakable injustices -- embodies all of the virtues -- profound Christian faith, stoic indifference to the misfortunes of fate, and especially unparalleled moral and physical courage to defend the weak -- that her white readers claimed to value above all others. In showing Uncle Tom's virtues, and cataloging the lack of them in most of the novel's white characters, Stowe holds an unflattering mirror up to her society, daring an unflinching self-examination of their consciences. Stowe's conflicted depiction of Uncle Tom, however, perfectly captures the inherent racism of her times, as well as the ongoing presence of this problem in contemporary America. This new edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, illustrated profusely with original and recent portrayals of the novel's characters, and annotated with insightful commentary by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (an acclaimed scholar of African American Studies), provides extensive historical context for the novel and also its critical reception, debate, repudiation, and abiding controversy.

Cabell Library PS2954.U5 2007

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

"What good is science fiction to Black people?" If you have ever wondered this, or if you've ever thought that the future was limited to shiny, cybernetic miracles, you need to read Bloodchild and Other Stories. A collection of five short stories and two wonderfully spare essays on the art of writing, this book serves as a fine introduction to the works of Octavia Butler (1947-2006).

Butler's novels have won the most prestigious awards in the science fiction world, even though they often deal with questions of race and culture that have not always captured the attention of science fiction writers, or the interest of science fiction readers. Her protagonists are frequently strong Black women - think Celie by way of Ellen Ripley. The stories in this volume include everything from synthetic diseases that rob people of their basic humanity to the subtleties of interpersonal relations in difficult circumstances. The title story is a science fictional exploration of the relationship between two unequal species that stands as a mind-bending exploration of slavery and human bondage. There are no laser swords or starships here - only a series of meditations on the possibilities of being human.

Cabell Library PS3552.U827 A6 2005

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Jennifer Darragh, Reference Librarian for Behavioral and Social Sciences

Albert French's I Can’t Wait on God is a richly visual, multi-layered novel set in a predominantly African American Pittsburgh neighborhood (Homewood) in the summer of 1950. The focal characters of the story are Willet Mercer, a beautiful young woman and her man Jeremiah Henderson. Willet, who has a palpable air of sadness about her, is eager to leave Homewood behind for New York City. In order to obtain money to leave, Jeremiah is propositioned to have Willet become a prostitute for Tommy Moses, a local pimp holding some pretty hefty purse strings. While the deal is being cemented, Willet suddenly stabs Tommy Moses to death. In shock, both Jeremiah and Willet hastily steal what money Moses had on him, ditch his body, and take his car to flee Pittsburgh. After the murder, French's novel splits to follow Willet and Jeremiah while they are on the run -- eventually leading to rural North Carolina and the source of Willet's sadness -- and how life continues on in Homewood. French's ability to evoke powerful imagery and develop multiple characters with considerable depth results in both an interesting and memorable story.

Cabell Library PS3556.R3948 I3 1998

Reviewed by Ibironke Lawal, Collection Librarian for Engineering and Sciences

Set in Afghanistan, The Kite Runner is a fascinating story of cowardice and courage, truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, sincerity and deceit all woven into one. It is the story of two boys, Amir and Hassan; the one, the son of a Pashtun--the elites of Afghan society, and the other, the son of an Hazara--the lower class. The Hazaras generally work as servants and bodyguards, frequently risking their lives to protect their Pashtun masters. The author's vivid account of the friendship between the two boys reveals the social disparity in that society as well as the humiliation and injustices that the Hazaras experience in their daily struggle for survival. Amir, a Pashtun, was born with the silver spoon in his mouth, while Hassan is both a friend and servant since his father (Ali), an Hazara, is a servant of Amir's father (Baba). Ironically, Amir's father (Baba) seems to have more affection for Hassan than for his own son (Amir). Out of jealousy, Amir sets Hassan up and accuses him of theft, a serious crime in Afghan society. As a result, Hassan and his father (Ali) were expelled from Amir's household, and soon Amir developed guilty conscience.

Shortly after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Amir and his father (Baba) sought political asylum in California to live as ordinary citizens. Though separated by thousands of miles, both Amir and Hassan grew up and got married. But, by twists and turns, Amir discovered that Hassan was his half-brother after all, though his father (Baba) did not tell him before he died. Then, news reached him that the Taliban had murdered Hassan and his wife and that a son called Sohrab survived them.

The cycle begins again, Sohrab has to save Amir's life just as his father before him. It is going to be different now. It is time for Amir to atone for his sins and make it up to Hassan by taking care of Sohrab. He has to free him from the insecure cruel life of abuse, hunger and grief. He brings him to America as his adopted son.

Though his first, Hosseini does a good job of telling the story from an Afghan point of view. The dichotomy he displays throughout the book of good and evil depicts the true state of things in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. One cannot but see the similarities between this and the civil rights era in America when African Americans had similar status to the 'Afghan Hazaras.' The book provides food for thought. It will appeal to all audiences even juveniles who are interested in learning about the culture of other countries.

Cabell Library PS3608.O832 K58 2003

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

In The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan revisits similar themes from her previous work, particularly the best-selling The Joy Luck Club. This later novel presents the multi-layered story of Ruth Young and her Chinese-born mother LuLing as an exploration of the complex relationship between mothers and daughters for whom cultural differences create an almost unbridgeable chasm. When Ruth discovers that LuLing is suffering from Alzheimer's, she begins to devote more time to caring for her mother, despite their somewhat bristling relationship. Spending time at her mother's home leads Ruth to reminisce about her childhood with LuLing, a pessimistic, argumentative woman who ferociously clings to old world notions of ghosts and curses. She then discovers the pages of LuLing's life story, bound in ribbon, and bearing the introduction "These are the things I should not forget." The reader is then transported to Immortal Heart, a small village in pre-WWII China, where the childhood story of LuLing unfolds, marked by family secrets and tragedy. Armed with the fascinating story of her mother's past, and an insight into LuLing's strength of character, Ruth is then able to begin mending their relationship. Tan's skill at presenting the novel from the perspective of both Ruth and the young LuLing allows for the development of two very realistic and unforgettable characters.

Cabell Library PS3570.A48 2001

Reviewed by Patricia Selinger, Head of Preservation

When I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I feel I am in the presence of great art. The author’s prose flows and evokes imagery like a masterpiece. It is a worthwhile diversion to refresh the spirit. With 200 pages, more or less depending on the edition, it takes just a short time to immerse into and emerge from a tale sure to stay with you forever.

The book begins with what Brother Juniper witnessed one day as he was walking on the road, just ten minutes from the bridge himself. He had stopped for a moment to celebrate the peace and joy in his heart. Then he heard a snapping sound and saw five people on the Bridge of San Luis Rey fall to their deaths. Trying to make sense of the incident, he wrote a treatise for the church to show how each person who died had been led to this death by God. Surely there was something in each person's life that warranted such an untimely, violent death. "Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan." Unfortunately, Brother Juniper failed to show the divine plan and the church burned him at the stake as a heretic. He had succeeded in showing the humanity of each person in their story — how everyone is good and bad, not evil but not divine, not always humble and not always self-indulgent. In his desire to include all the details of a person's life, he unwittingly wrote how everyone bears difficult loss and anticipates joy, both spiritual and carnal. And then, it was his turn to contemplate his role in forces of good and evil. Others in the town are affected by the deaths and seek meaning in their own way. The bridge becomes a metaphor holding together the land of the living and the land of the dead. What are the bridges you must cross in your life?

I have returned to this book many times in my life. Each time I am reminded what good prose is, and what a good story is. I believe it helps me to be a better writer.

Cabell Library PS 3545 .I345 B7

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Narrated in the first person by March (with some chapters from wife Marmee's point of view), this very personal account of war, with all its brutality, inhumanity, and both physical and emotional suffering is quite disturbing, and difficult to read at times. Yet it is nicely interspersed with reminiscences of the Marches' domestic life in Concord, Massachusetts, which help create the rich character development of both March and Marmee. March won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Interested in more by Brooks, or other works about the Civil War? Check out Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, or Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by her husband, Tony Horwitz.

Cabell Library PR9619.3.B7153 M37 2005
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Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

The private thoughts, dreams, and desires, the inner life, of the original Renaissance man, William Shakespeare — frequently claimed as the world's greatest playwright — escape us. Living in a time before autobiography became expected of writers — before we came to demand the truth about those who bewitch us with fictions — Shakespeare left no workaday record of the machinations of his imagination. How then, we are left to ask, did someone seemingly so ordinary, the son of a failed glove-maker in rural England, emerge with such undying depictions of the human condition? To the eminent Shakespearean scholar Samuel Schoenbaum, the poet's genius eludes explanation; yet several recent biographies — especially Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt — seek to flush out the scant biography with imaginative hypotheses about the Mind of the Bard. Perhaps it takes the license of fiction to truly reveal Shakespeare's secrets, and such is the aim of the British novelist Anthony Burgess (who evokes the rowdiness of Elizabethan English in ways similar to the criminal slang of A Clockwork Orange) in Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life. Shakespeare's stream-of- consciousness pours forth in Burgess' account of the poet's youth, as the vibrancy of the world, its beauties, sorrows, temptations, and triumphs, registers itself upon his imagination. We see the full complexity of what Shakespeare might very well have been like — more concerned at times with his own art than with the messy business of responsibilities. Burgess' Shakespeare is greedy for experience, willful, intent, daring, more than a bit selfish — but whose mysterious artistry takes in the world and returns it to us, transformed, renewed.

Cabell Library PR6052.U638 N6

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

Eventide is a quiet, yet memorable, chronicle of life in Holt, a small, rural town in the Colorado plains. Many of the town's residents made their debut in the National Book Award finalist Plainsong, yet Eventide introduces memorable new characters, and is not necessarily a sequel to Haruf's earlier work. This newer novel tells the stories of a disabled couple and their children, a boy living with his grandfather, and others whose lives intersect during the course of the year. The plot unfolds somewhat slowly, but this pace seems natural, perfectly suited to the creeping days of a harsh Colorado autumn and winter. Indeed, the landscape itself — the lonely town isolated in dreary plains — is a palpable force in this novel, and also serves to highlight Haruf's beautiful, yet honest and unassuming prose. "It was a Saturday night," he writes, "the sky overhead clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up against the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he never would have said it in that way."

Though tinged with sadness, this story of decent, ordinary people has a redemptive quality that makes the novel strangely uplifting. Try Plainsong first, and I guarantee that you will want to pick up Eventide.

Cabell Library PS3558.A716 E93 2004
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Reviewed by Dave Morrison, VCU Libraries Building Manager

The Road is Cormac McCarthy's latest delve into the human condition. Its penultimate and nightmarish scenario offers a horrific vision of an Earth gone dead from an apocalyptic event far beyond our conception. It is a dark world not to be confused with Mad Max's post-nuclear war celluloid land of fast, fun dune buggies and blue skies. McCarthy's burned out landscape is choked with the ash of an unimaginable and unexplained fiery holocaust. Two survivors, who are known only as the man and the boy, trek through a silent world void of sunlight, food, and hope. Snow falls gray and neither plants nor animals have survived the event. Heading south for what they believe will be a warmer climate, pushing a shopping cart through ankle deep ash that smothers the ground, man and boy evade armies of lost souls who have found it easier to turn to cannibalism for their nourishment. They scavenge whatever they can to survive. They are the "good guys." Their small and worried dialogues over foraged cans of peaches and pork & beans are quaint and loving under the hellish trials they endure daily in such an unnatural world. Readers whose senses were assaulted by McCarthy's 1986 Blood Meridian, a Western gore-tromp through some of contemporary literature's most violent writing, will be just as riveted to this "End of the World" tale. For all its bleakness, hope and love speak volumes throughout this book.

Cabell Library PS3563.C337 R63 2006

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Hailed in the 20th Century as the Great American Novel, an American Homeric epic, in the 19th Century Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (http://www.melville.org/), was dismissed by critics — and readers — when first published in 1851, sending its author into the depths of despair so thoroughly plumbed by his story itself. Perhaps it took the catastrophe of the American Civil War and the horrors of the First World War, with their brutal lessons in the cruel injustices, the great swathes of death, that humans inflict upon one another, to transform Melville's novel from a mere story of New England whaling (which it never was) into a prophecy of the doom that awaits those who forsake mastery of their own wants and desires for mastery and domination of others, and even of Nature itself. In the character of Ahab, hunting relentlessly for the White Whale, and whose tragic, Biblical name foreshadows the destruction he will bring upon himself and his crew on the fatal voyage of the Pequod, Melville captures the seemingly irremediable disease of modernity: namely, revenge upon Nature (for its lack of concern for humanity), and, born of that revenge, the monomaniacal assertion of Self against the common good. A compendium (or "anatomy," in Melville's terms) of the influences that compose American identity — Puritanism and its paradoxes, the love-hate relationship with Nature, the supremacy of the rights of the individual versus the democratic inclusiveness of the happiness of all — Moby Dick continues to beckon us away from the terra firma of our own selfishness and into the unending flux of myth.

Cabell Library Various Call Numbers and Locations
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

Pigs in Heaven tells the story of Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter, who flee their Tucson home after a lawyer from the Cherokee Nation shows up on their doorstep claiming that Turtle's adoption is invalid and that she may need to return to the tribe. Although you may recognize these characters from Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven is not a sequel and can be read independent of the earlier novel. It addresses some interesting issues, such as the balance between the rights of an individual and the sacrifices made for the sake of the community. Does Turtle rightfully belong with the only mother she has known for the past three years, or with Cherokee relatives who will instill in her the knowledge of her heritage and their identity? Kingsolver is aware that there are no easy answers, and one can detect a sense of the compassion and empathy that she has for all of the characters, in whom she creates the ability to see the issue in shades of gray.

The writing is lovely, as one would expect from Kingsolver, although I personally found some of the coincidences and the ending a bit too convenient. While it is still an enjoyable and worthwhile read, I would recommend some of her other novels — particularly Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams — as better introductions to Kingsolver's work.

Cabell Library PS3561.I496 P54 1993
Spanish Edition: Cabell Library PS3561.I496 P5417 1995
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and Public Affairs

Peace Like a River is one of those rare novels that combines beautiful, almost poetic, language with engaging storytelling. Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land narrates the story of his family as their quiet Midwestern way of life abruptly ends in the winter of 1962, when his older brother Davy kills two teenagers who break into their home. During his trial, Davy escapes from jail one night and heads west, setting into motion a manhunt that soon involves federal investigators. Guided by faith, Reuben, his father, and his sister head west with hopes of reunion — though they have no idea where Davy is headed. "Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes," states Reuben. "It starts to look like something else — ignorance for example." Yet the Lands press on, with help along the way from friends both old and new, as well as from some well-timed miracles, brought on by the haunting character of Jeremiah Land, whose relationship with God is not unlike that of the Old Testament prophets. With compelling characters, lyrical descriptions of stark North Dakota winters, and its nod to the Wild West, Peace Like a River is an example of contemporary American literature at its best.

Cabell Library PS3555.N4223 P42 2001
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Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

This engaging novel consists of vignettes about Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the only female-owned detective agency in Botswana. Part detective story, part ode to southern Africa, Mma Ramotswe's narrative weaves reminiscences about growing up in Africa with stories of her Miss Marple-style detective work, tracking down missing husbands, sneaky teenagers, and a kidnapped boy. Interspersed with these passages, Smith also explores themes such as colonialism and independence, traditions, and progress in southern Africa. His writing is deceptively simple and straightforward, yet beautiful, particularly the descriptions of the landscape and Mma Ramotswe's love for Africa. In Mma Ramotswe, Smith has created a charming character — honest, clever, and full of good old common sense, which serves her well in her chosen profession. Yet this book is not just for mystery readers; the solid writing, pleasing pace, and colorful characters make it a great choice for any reader. You may just fall in love with Mma Ramotswe and want to read more books in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

Cabell Library PR6063.C326 N6 1998

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

This beautiful novel about love and loneliness centers around two richly-developed characters whose lives are intricately entwined, though they are unaware of their connection. Leopold Gursky is an elderly Holocaust refugee, a retired locksmith who spends the last stage of his life reminiscing about a lost love and fighting to erase the invisibility he assumed during years in hiding. Alma Singer is a 14-year-old girl who busies herself with attempts to assuage her widowed mother's loneliness and with a quest to find the woman after whom she was named and who she is convinced exists — a character in the novel The History of Love. Krauss skillfully weaves Alma's and Leo's stories with excerpts from the fictitious The History of Love and vignettes about its author. As the seemingly divergent plots unfold, one begins to realize that things are not as they appear to be. Who is the mysterious stranger whose offer of a large sum of money convinces Alma's mother to translate The History of Love? And who exactly is Leo Gursky? As the stories converge, the pace of this novel quickens, and its tender conclusion will leave you breathless.

Cabell Library PS3611.R38 H57 2005

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

When linguist Paul Iverson arrives home to find his wife dead following a fall from their backyard apple tree, he is confused and heartbroken. Was it an accident? She had never previously expressed an interest in tree-climbing. Was she picking apples? Did she intentionally fall or jump? He wasn't aware that she was unhappy or contemplating suicide. The only witness to Lexy's death was her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Lorelei. As a linguist, Iverson knew of previous attempts to teach dogs to talk and he decides to attempt the same with Lorelei to discover what she saw that fateful day. In the meantime, he finds other clues that raise more questions about Lexy's last day. As Paul mourns and struggles with the mysteries surrounding his wife's death, he reflects on their marriage and what it means to truly know and understand those that you love.

Cabell Library PS3616.A754 D6 2003

Reviewed by Jessica Waugh, Library Specialist

This hilarious recounting of the first 30 years of Jesus Christ (according to his best friend, known as Levi in the Bible, Biff in this book) is recommended for anyone who wants a good belly laugh and a slightly skewed take on the Son of God's early years. Biff finds himself in the 20th century, brought back from the dead, sequestered in the Hyatt Hotel in St. Louis and told he must complete the task of putting down the particulars of the early life of Jesus (aka Josh) before he could find any peace. His captor, a humorless angel, forbids him any contact with the outside world. Even the hotel's Gideon's Bible is off-limits to Biff since the angel doesn't want him to know "the ending."

As the life of Jesus prior to the age of 30 is scarcely covered in sacred texts, humorist Christopher Moore takes us on a wild romp through China, India and the holy lands starting with Josh as a small boy (making his mother Mary's face appear on a piece of bread; partially resurrecting a dead frog) and going through his death and beyond. Biff gets to do all the things that Josh will not permit himself to experience. Both boys have a crush on Mary Magdelene, but only Biff will act on it. Actually, Biff is enamored of nearly every female in his life — especially Josh's mom, Mary. His love for the ladies is prominent throughout his tale.

As teens, Biff and Josh take off for lands unknown because Josh is beginning to realize that he has a "higher purpose," but he isn't sure exactly what that is. He makes the decision to seek knowledge from various sources, including conjurers, sorcerers and mages. In their hunt for the Three Wise Men, their exploits are laced with Buddhist and Hindu sub-plots and Moore's unique take on the real meaning of the parables of Jesus. By the end of Biff's story, we learn of his heartbreak when he is unable to talk Josh out of sacrificing himself for the world. The adventures of Biff and Josh endear both of them to the reader and at the end of this romp, you realize that you've read something surprisingly spiritual and moving.

Cabell Library PS3563.O594 L36 2002

Reviewed by Jessica Waugh, Library Specialist

In this work of historical fiction, Brooks recreates a year in the life of a small British town stricken by bubonic plague in the 17th century. Inspired by actual events and a place known as "Plague Village," Brooks writes a harrowing account of isolation, death and social disintegration as seen through the eyes of young Anna Firth.

Anna narrates this tale with concision and controlled emotion. We learn that the plague was brought to the town by one itinerant tailor, whom she nursed without realizing the gravity of his illness. Her charity to this stranger reaps ill rewards as she describes the subsequent infection and death of her husband, children and neighbors. When the village minister announces that this plague is God's judgment and recommends the town shut itself off from the outside world, the citizens comply. With mounting deaths, however, superstition and fear begin to overwhelm the largely uneducated population. Violence in the form of witch hunting begins. Anna, the minister, and his wife attempt to calm the populace and provide succor to sickened villagers using the simple herbs of the time. When the dead outnumber the living, Anna laments that burial rites become all but impossible. She wonders if anyone will survive the scourge.

Brooks's research about the time period and the mechanics of the bubonic plague are remarkable. The result is a gritty, fascinating story with particular relevance today given recent concerns about the rise of drug-resistant disease and the inevitability of a pandemic. Although set in a time considered medically primitive, this story offers insight into the moral dilemmas of a society overwhelmed by sweeping contagion.

Cabell Library PR9619.3.B7153 Y4 2001

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

A CIA agent, a shaman, and a defrocked nun. Sound like another joke of the "guy walked into a bar" variety? These are some of the characters who populate this Tom Robbins tale that explores everything from religion, miracles, and taboos to sex, drugs, and Broadway show tunes. The novel follows Switters, a hedonistic, renegade CIA operative, from an unusual errand in Peru to Seattle to Syria to the Vatican. Along the way, he is cursed by a shaman, tries to woo his sixteen-year-old stepsister, and falls in with a convent of desert nuns who harbor a secret document of world-changing magnitude. Sound like a good time? This kooky plot is a perfect vehicle for Robbins's trademark finesse of the English language. His similes would make any English teacher swoon: "Overhead, the lemons swung like papier-mâché stars in a cheesy planetarium." After reading his prose, you'll see why Robbins was named by Writer's Digest as one of the 100 best writers of the 20th century.

Want to read more Tom Robbins? Check out Another Roadside Attraction.

Cabell Library PS3568.O233 F54 2000 Various Locations

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

The English satirist, novelist, and essayist Eric Blair — better known by his pseudonym, George Orwell (see LION for biographical and critical information) — has often been called the conscience of the 20th Century. His works, especially his satires (notably Animal Farm and 1984), cannot be confined merely to the socio-political entrapments set by dictators, demagogues, and even, at times, democracies of that era. Orwell's unsparing dissections of hypocrisy, cant, jingoism, jargon, sloganeering, and deceitfulness of all kinds — practiced at the personal and the political levels (which, thanks to Orwell, we now see as often being one and the same) — comprise an indispensable grammar of the unjust workings of power against the powerless. Animal Farm (subtitled "A Fairy Story") was written shortly after the end of World War II, and was read at the time as an indictment of the tyrannies of Facism, Nazism, and Stalinism; it may also be read, however, as a rebuke to all forms of government that repress the freedom to speak or think in terms that oppose the status quo. The "fairy story" elements of Orwell's fable — the sudden ability for animals to speak; the overthrow of Mr. Jones's farm by the animals (led by the sagacious pigs and their aptly named leader, Napoleon) — enfold an unsettling subtext: under the guise of "freeing" the animals from their oppressor, the pigs pervert the revolution by metamorphosing into oppressors themselves, worse, even, than Mr. Jones. Perhaps most troubling of all — for, in the Swiftian tradition, the ambiguity of Orwell's satire precludes a safe vantage point — Animal Farm allows no innocent optimism for the progress of freedom over tyranny, and in that sense the fable, like all of Orwell's writings, stands as a dire warning against complacency and, most importantly, "groupthink." As the pigs proclaim in one of their many revisions to the rules that govern the happiness of life at Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" — thus declaring a war upon freedom in Orwell's day and in our own.

Cabell Library PS6029 .R8 Various Locations
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Reviewed by Sam Byrd, Digital Repository Librarian

Readers looking for modern fiction with interesting well-rounded characters and a strong plot (or, indeed, any story line at all) would do well to steer clear of Gilbert Sorrentino. Sorrentino is a brilliant experimental writer whose works of social satire explore the boundaries of fiction. A strong theme of his work is questioning the conventional notion of language's ability to convey the nature of reality. He also has little patience with the misuse of language. Through close parody of all kinds of discourse and a knack for writing "bad" prose (combined with a strong use of formal structure), he is a master at skewering hackneyed fiction writing. His best-known novel (Mulligan Stew) at least has a plot to speak of, but his latest work of fiction, Lunar Follies, is a plotless series of essays in the form of an exhibition catalog for imaginary works of museum and art installations named after geographical features of the moon. In the process of describing these works, he satirizes the elitism of the art world while capturing the tone and attitude of modern art criticism: "the primal, deeply honest, abidingly tough, slashingly calligraphic strokes of famed abstract painter Franz Kline's hommages to unknown Japanese masters, as well as to his Polish-German coal-miner parents, discover a new, quietly content life in the warmly masculine and chastely acerbic spring loungewear collection by Renatita Iglioni." Works described include sculpture, photo montages, erotica collections, and the Iconocult Museum's "much-visited and remarked-upon New York Times Arts & Leisure wall."

Lunar Follies is a tough read, enjoyable in the moment but leaving you with a sense that your brain has been scrubbed out. For a more "conventional" take on the novel, try an earlier work, Gold Fools. This novel actually has a story, something to do with two teenaged boys who go on an expedition in the desert to find gold. The trick here is that Sorrentino has composed the entire book in interrogative sentences, all the while parodying dime-novel boys' adventure stories and westerns: "Did it seem that Billee was, by thunder, a-goin' to jine Hank and the young fellers in their looming quest? Was his remark, to the effect that it 'peared likely that he'd mosey and take his chance on hittin' a grubstake a giveaway as to his intentions? What is a grubstake?"

After several pages of this, can you see why most contemporary reviews of this novel consisted of nothing but questions? Will I continue the rest of these remarks with nothing but questions? No, I won't, but it's mighty tempting. Ostensibly an adventure story, Gold Fools has plenty of passages like the following, where Sorrentino continues his ongoing battle against the effects of shallow, facile writing: "Did Bud sit bolt upright and murmur that he felt summat like he had done asked a question that mebbe the answer to which somebody had hollered at him while he was still asnooze? Did this authentic Western speech pattern accurately reflect Bud's disturbed mental state? Was it somewhat Faulknerian? Melvillean? Conradian? Hemingwayesque? Or a little of each, i.e., McCarthyan?"

The passages above only hint at Sorrentino's subtle but unrelenting humor. The cumulative effect may not be more than a subdued chuckle, but I guarantee that after Sorrentino you'll never read a brochure in the same way again.

For more on Sorrentino, see the April 2006 issue of Jacket Magazine at http://jacketmagazine.com/29/index.shtml. His next novel, A Strange Commonplace, is coming out in May 2006.

Lunar Follies, Cabell Library PS3569.O7 L86 2005

Gold Fools, Cabell Library PS3569.O7 G65 2001

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Betty Smith became an overnight celebrity when her first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published in 1943. Much of the novel surrounds Francie Nolan's childhood in Brooklyn, New York. Smith colorfully describes the various people Francie encounters, and portrays both the hardships and small joys of living in an impoverished family and community. Although she is a lonely child, Francie's greatest escape is found in books and from her perch on the fire escape outside her home, she reads and watches her neighbors interact through the branches of the tree growing around her. She thinks often of her lovable, alcoholic father, her hard-working mother, and her younger brother and best friend, Neely. The novel is somewhat autobiographical—both Smith and Francie Nolan grew up in the tenements of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, both loved theatre and reading, and both completed an eighth-grade education before working odd jobs and eventually enrolling as a special student at the University of Michigan. This classic coming-of-age story is compelling both for its literary merit and for its portrayal of city life in the early 1900's.

Cabell Library PS3537.M2895 T71

Reviewed by Judy Pask, Reference Librarian

Set in a time of both political and religious turmoil, this historical novel, The Illuminator has everything—romance, adventure, murder, and mystery. It is the story of a fourteenth century illuminator of religious manuscripts named Finn who with his sixteen year old daughter boards in the manor home of Lady Kathryn, a widow with twin fifteen year old sons. Their personal lives, present and past, intertwine with disastrous results as each character deals with their sense of duty and position in English feudal society on the verge of great change. The author weaves an engaging story combining both historical figures such as John Wycliffe, John Ball, and Bishop Henry Despenser, and the fictional characters of Finn, his daughter Rose; Lady Kathryn, her sons Alfred and Colin; a dwarf named Half-Tom, and Agnes the manor's hardworking cook.

Cabell Library PS3622 .A675 I45 2005

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

At the center of this amazing work of storytelling are the four ex-wives of Jack Mauser, who become stranded together in a blizzard after attending his funeral. To pass the time, stay alert, and ensure their survival, they huddle together and share stories of how their lives intersected with Jack—a charming, self-destructive man who let his first wife die in a snowstorm, an incident which haunts him throughout his subsequent marriages.

"Pretend this car is a confessional," says Dot. "Rule one...No shutting up until dawn. Rule two. Tell a true story. Rule three. The story has to be about you. Something that you've never told another soul, a story that would scorch paper, heat up the air!"

Erdrich skillfully weaves the wives' stories together with exquisite prose, setting them against the background of a stark, expansive North Dakota landscape. The narrative structure of the book is also very compelling; the style with which it swings back and forth between memories and the present from different points of view (yet never confusingly so) adds to the dreamlike quality of the stories that unfurl.

Cabell Library PS3555.R42 T3

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Frederich Buechner, a Presbyterian minister, is a prolific writer of both nonfiction and fiction works focusing on moral and religious themes. The Son of Laughter is Buechner's retold and embellished story of Israel's biblical patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob narrates the story, and focuses mainly on his family relations—first, his father, Isaac, his mother, Rebekah, and his brother, Esau. He is forced to flee after he and his mother plot to deceive his father into bestowing him with the birthright (blessing and inheritance), rather than Esau who is the older son. He goes to live and work with his uncle Laban and marries two of Laban's daughters: first Leah (after working seven years for the right to marry Rachel), then after another seven years of work, finally Rachel. After several years, Jacob has many children and much wealth. He decides to return home and attempt to be reunited with Esau and raise his children in the land of his forefathers. The remainder of the story is about Jacob's son Joseph, whom his brothers sold into slavery in Egypt and eventually becomes the Pharaoh's trusted advisor. Buechner artfully interweaves these characters and stories in a narrative that brings passages from the book of Genesis to life.

Cabell Library PS3552.U35 S67 1993

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

The Color Purple is one of Alice Walker's most celebrated novels. Its main character is Celie, an African American in the south who writes of her heartache and misery in a series of letters—first to God, then to her sister who is a missionary in Africa. A striking characteristic of this novel is its portrayal of African American men and how they treat African American women. Celie and other female characters are often raped, beaten, treated like mules, and degraded by their husbands, fathers, and lovers. In Celie's case, she goes from growing up with an abusive stepfather to a bad marriage with a much older man who treats her like a servant while spending much of his time with his lover, Shug. Despite their connection to the same man, Shug and Celie forge a unique and loving relationship that allows Celie to transform from being passive and submissive to being independent and self-confident. Her transformation also creates a positive change in her husband, Albert, and despite the tragedies and hardships Celie faced over the years, the reader is left with a sense of optimism about her fate. The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for fiction.

Cabell Library PS3573.A425 C6

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is a collection of short stories and a novella set in fictional Tims Creek, a rural North Carolina town closely resembling Kenan's hometown. Many of the stories contain elements of magical realism including spirits, talking animals, and wizards. The novella is ostensibly an academic study of oral histories, diaries, and letters (complete with footnotes to real and fictional sources) relating to the history of Tims Creek. Themes of racial tensions, the black experience, and homosexuality are explored in this novella, as well as in the other short stories in this collection and in Randall Kenan's other fiction and nonfiction works.

Cabell Library PS3561.E4228 L48 1992

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Ngoc-My Guidarelli, Cataloging Librarian

A young man named Jefferson was accused of killing a white tavern keeper during an attempted hold up which also involved two other black men. Jefferson happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and of the wrong skin color. The time was the pre-civil rights period, the place, the segregated south, and Jefferson was a poor and uneducated black man. During the trial, a well-meaning public defender, in the hope of exculpating his client, claimed that Jefferson was a hog, and as such, was incapable of discerning right from wrong. This offensive remark so deeply affected our protagonist that he behaved like a pig in jail. His godmother, Miss Emma, decided to enlist the help of the plantation teacher, Mr. Wiggins, to make her son a man before he went to the electric chair. The latter was extremely reluctant to help because he only knew how to teach "reading, writing, and arithmetic". Besides, as an educated person, he did not want to deal with white men who often sought to humiliate him. According to him, matters of the soul should be best addressed by a minister. After many visits to the jail, Mr. Wiggins finally broke through Jefferson's wall of silence. His offering of a radio, a notepad and pencil to help Jefferson open up during his final days paid off at last. Jefferson walked to his death standing tall, "on his two feet, like a man" as his godmother had wished. The teacher was supported all along this arduous rescue of a soul by the love of his colleague, Vivian. The author made several references to the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ which parallel Jefferson's own execution on a Friday after Easter. Like Jesus, Jefferson was preceded in death by two robbers. A Lesson Before Dying seems to imply that Mr. Wiggins taught Jefferson how to be a man. The end of the story reveals quite the opposite. The condemned man has inculcated to both black and white communities the values of faith and love.

Cabell Library PS3557.A355 L47 1994

Cabell Library PS3557.A355 L47 1993

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Robert Johnson, Education Services Librarian, Tompkins-McCaw Library

I can add nothing to the huge body of criticism praising the novel Native Son by Richard Wright. Other works by "Naturalists" such as Stephen Crane and Jack London pit humans as mere animals striving for survival against nature, a force we can't control or really understand. Wright's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, fights for survival against a force he can't control, and that force is the white society that keeps him down, that demoralizes him, that treats him as an animal. The introductory chapter (in which Bigger traps and kills a rat) is the story of the novel in a microcosm, an absolutely brilliant narrative device. This novel is a thought provoking, exciting, and powerful piece of work.

Cabell Library PS3545.R815

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Although on its surface, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might seem a simple tale of a slave and teenage boy rafting down the Mississippi River, its many layers have made this book one of the most challenged of all time. In the preface, Mark Twain warns the reader against analyzing the book too closely: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Huckleberry Finn decides to fake his own death in order to escape his drunken father, and hides out on a deserted island. There, he encounters Jim, a runaway slave. They sail south on the Mississippi towards Cairo, where Jim will be able to head north and escape slavery. On the way they encounter crooks, family feuds, and even Huck's old friend Tom Sawyer. The serious undercurrent running throughout the book is Jim's status as a slave and Huck's moral response as he wrestles with his conscience. He was taught to believe that breaking the law (by harboring a slave) would lead to hell, but on the other hand, betraying his friendship with Jim is also wrong. Much has been speculated about Mark Twain's own views on the subject, as this book was written two decades after slavery was abolished. Judge for yourself as you read this timeless American classic.

Cabell Library-Many Call Numbers

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Julian Houston, an associate justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, grew up in Richmond in the early Civil Rights era. His young adult novel, the semi-autobiographical New Boy, recounts Houston's experiences in the wake of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation, Brown vs. Board of Education—a decision that sparked the closing of the Prince Edward County school system in Virginia. Houston's story skillfully shows the torn allegiances of Robert Garrett, whose academic success propels him into the world of Draper Academy, a private school in Connecticut in the late 1950s. As Draper's first black student, Garrett must face prejudice in unfamiliar forms, while also struggling with the isolation of being at Draper as the larger struggle for Civil Rights takes place at home. At each stage of his journey, Garrett meets resistance and acceptance from family, friends, and strangers alike, maturing into a compassionate leader and activist against racism.

Cabell Library PZ7.H8225 N4 2005

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Robert Johnson, Education Services Librarian, Tompkins-McCaw Library

Jessi's family is new in town, and is one of the only African American families. When Jessi begins babysitting Matt, part of another family new to town, she discovers she isn't the only person who feels the sting of being "different." Jessi's Secret Language is book #16 in The Baby-Sitters Club series, which spawned a television series and a movie.

Community Health Education Center PZ7 .M35675 J47 1988b

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Written in the form of an oral history, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the story of a 110-year-old former slave. She recounts the major events of her life in Louisiana, including slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. Jane Pittman rarely strays from the various plantations where she lives and works, so it is a much more localized perspective than other novels covering these time periods, such as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man or Richard Wright's Native Son. As such, much is revealed through her relationships with others, including her adopted son, Ned Douglass, who becomes a martyr for civil rights, her first husband, Joe Pittman, and the other women in her community. Jane Pittman is one of the most memorable African American characters—she is aware of her flaws and strengths, and she makes difficult decisions, at times selflessly encouraging loved ones to pursue their path even when that path takes them far from her.

Cabell Library PS3557.A355 A9

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Robert Johnson, Education Services Librarian

Toni Morrison's Jazz begins in 1926, when a salesman shoots and kills his teenage lover. At the girl's funeral, the man's wife attacks her corpse. The ensuing pages skirt between past, present, and future as the drama reveals itself. Not only is Toni Morrison's novel Jazz a gripping story of love and betrayal, but it also functions as an album of jazz music. It isn't just that Morrison captures the spirit of jazz music, or that she traces the history of the music as it moved from the country to the city (which she does), but Morrison's novel is structured like a piece of music. Characters function as instruments, and sections as songs. In particular, it compares nicely to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, for the differences as much as the similarities. Coltrane's album revolves around spiritual revelation and praise and is almost entirely music, while Morrison's album centers on sex and the secular world and is all words. Both are four songs long, and if the concept of an entirely written word song seems implausible, check out song four "Psalm," which is part music and part free-verse poetry written in the liner notes (not sung). Morrison's book is the work of masterful writer at the height of her powers.

Cabell Library PS3563.O8749 J38 1992

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Robert Johnson, Education Services Librarian, Tompkins-McCaw Library

Set over a period of two days and one night, the action in Go Tell It on the Mountain happens primarily in the past. Ostensibly a bildungsroman exploring 14-yr-old John Grimes' supposed spiritual awakening, author James Baldwin creates a novel of greater depth than that description affords. Baldwin uses the "coming of age" form to compose a narrative involving religious hypocrisy, personal sacrifice, the Great Depression, homosexuality, and the exodus of African Americans from their Southern rural homes to Northern, urban dwellings.

Cabell Library PS3552.A45 G58 1985

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

The Nanny Diaries is a smart and hilarious send-up of New York's Park Avenue families as told by the hired help. Written by two former nannies, this work of fiction has the feel of a tell-all exposé, with a healthy dash of wry social commentary thrown in for good measure. It tells the story of Nanny, an NYU college student who cares for the young son of Mr. & Mrs. X, a workaholic investment banker and his cold wife, "a woman who neither works nor mothers. And her day remains a mystery to us all." During her time with Grayer, Nan encounters a colorful cast of characters, including a demonic child named Darwin and a former Vegas showgirl with a cocaine habit and a 4-year-old. While the characters tend toward two-dimensional and underdeveloped, this seems to heighten the novel's role as satire. And however unreal this world may appear, the authors have insisted that all the situations in the book were actually experienced by themselves or their peers. This is why the novel's debut caused quite a stir among New York socialites who attempted to deduce the real people behind these infuriating, yet pity-inducing, characters.

Cabell Library PS3613.C575 N36 2002

Reviewed by Mark Elliott, Library Specialist

This Australian satire is set in a near future where the culture of big business has overtaken every aspect of life. Aggressive marketing entails murder, corporate raids are executed by armed mercenaries, and if you want a crime investigated by the police, you have to pay them up front. In Max Barry's alternative reality, employees are surnamed after the company for which they work (a pair of frightening villains are both named John Nike), which is just one of many telling details illustrating how dominant corporate life has become. But the effect in the story is far from a dense, Orwellian exposition. The particulars of life in the Australian States of America are easily grasped and never slow the pace of the adventures of plucky government agent Jennifer, a former marketing genius and single mother who finds herself trying to shut down the ultimate campaign. Despite its chilling subject matter, Jennifer Government is lively, readable and very funny.

Cabell Library PS3552.A7424 J46 2003

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

In contrast to the lengthy Possession: A Romance, another A. S. Byatt work reviewed on this site, The Matisse Stories is a small collection of three short stories. Each of the stories incorporates a different Matisse painting, although they are about contemporary characters going about their everyday lives. Byatt's descriptions are colorful and highly sensory...not only when she is describing the Matisse paintings, but also as she describes setting and character. All three stories are primarily about relationships—between a woman and her hairdresser; between a husband, wife, and their housekeeper; and between an academic department head and a professor accused of sexual harassment—and how those relationships alternately hide and reveal complex human emotions.

Cabell Library PR6052.Y2 M38 1993

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

How to be Good delivers the same dry wit and subtle intelligence as Nick Hornby's other works (among them About a Boy, High Fidelity, and A Long Way Down). It is narrated by Katie, a middle-aged mother of two and wife of "The Angriest Man in Holloway," which is the byline on her husband's newspaper column. After many years of marriage, she is ready to call it quits but as she wavers and wrestles with this decision throughout the book, her husband undergoes some very dramatic changes. No longer is he angry (which means that he is now unemployed), he embarks on a campaign to save the world, starting with his street and city. He is mentored by his guru, GoodNews, a spiritual healer who moves into their home after being evicted from his apartment. Despite the humor and constant surprises, this book does address some complex issues: What makes someone a good person? Katie thinks she qualifies as Good because she is a doctor, a helper (even though she frequently has a bad attitude about her patients). Should being good require sacrifice? Is lack of marital happiness a sign of marital dysfunction? Does that merit divorce or require perseverance? Hornby was awarded the W H Smith Book Award for How to be Good in 2002.

Cabell Library PR6058.O689 H69 2001

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

This is an unusual review in that I haven't actually read any Sherlock Holmes mysteries but did want to pass on information about an exciting opportunity to receive Sherlock Holmes stories in serial format. Stanford Library is highlighting several Arthur Conan Doyle texts from their Special Collections, and will deliver the materials free of charge to all subscribers. You can receive the stories in print or via email just as they appeared originally in The Strand Magazine. Charles Dickens also wrote serialized fiction and Stanford's previous serial delivery projects include Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to experience reading great literature in a new way. See http://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu/index.html for more information and to subscribe.

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Bel Canto opens with a lavish birthday celebration honoring Japanese businessman Mr. Hosokawa, whose sole reason for visiting this unnamed South American country is to hear the world-famous soprano, Roxane Coss. During the festivities, armed terrorists break into the Vice President's home, where the party is taking place. Their plan to kidnap the President is thwarted when they discover he is not in attendance, and instead, they hold the partygoers captive. The next day, several men and all women (except Roxane Coss) are released, and the captors and hostages settle into their new routines. The hostages are from all over the world, and have only Mr. Hosokawa's translator to assist them in communicating. As days stretch into weeks and weeks stretch into months, the captors and prisoners form strong bonds with each other and with the music that comes to dominate their existence. Life in the house becomes idyllic for many of its inhabitants, and preferable to the world outside the walls surrounding the mansion. Patchett's inspiration for Bel Canto was a 1996 hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, which lasted for more than four months and was said to include soccer games, chess matches between captors and hostages, and pizza delivery. Bel Canto won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a P.E.N./Faulkner nominee.

Cabell Library PS3566.A7756 B4 2001

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

If your family responsibilities over the Thanksgiving holiday involve entertaining your young relatives, make your way up to the fourth floor of Cabell Library to browse through our collection of juvenile and young adult literature. For a festive read, grab An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, which would be good for the fourth- or fifth-graders in your family. It is the story of the Bassett family living in New Hampshire in the mid-1800s. After their parents are called away unexpectedly to visit a sick relative, the seven Bassett children decide to prepare for Thanksgiving themselves. Of course, surprises, cooking mishaps, and misadventures follow but all ends well as a large crowd gathers for a successful Thanksgiving feast. Since it was published first in 1882, the language and New Hampshire dialect may be challenging for young readers, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.

Cabell Library Juvenile Literature (4th floor) PZ7 .A335 O43 1989

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Bee Season is Myla Goldberg's debut novel, and is about a contemporary Jewish family on the verge of falling apart. Eliza Naumann is an average nine-year-old with no expectations of glory. She surprises herself and everyone she knows when she easily wins her school's spelling bee. As she goes on to compete in regional, then national bees, she becomes the object of her father's devotion and love. Her sixteen-year-old brother, a high achiever, had previously been the prized child and is uncomfortable with the shift in family dynamics. He becomes increasingly alienated from his family as immerses himself in a Hare Krishna religious community. Their mother, a lawyer and family breadwinner, is involved in her own private battles with mental illness and obsessive stealing which spirals out of control.

Among the various complex relationships between the Naumann family members, the most engaging is that of Eliza and her father, who is devoted to the study of Jewish mysticism. Eliza craves her father's pleasure and praise resulting from her spelling success, and thrives on the time they spend working together even as her family is breaking apart. At the same time, she blames herself for her family's troubles, and has to decide which is more important: her father's approval or her family's cohesion.

Cabell Library PS3557.O35819 B44

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

Possession begins when Roland, a scholar of the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers a letter Ash wrote to Christabel LaMotte, one of the era's first feminist writers. Roland's sleuthing for more information regarding a possible link between the two poets leads him to Maud Bailey, a somewhat haughty and distanced LaMotte scholar. The two embark on a quest together, determined to uncover the truth and find out the extent of the Ash-LaMotte relationship, which could radically alter their lives' work and scholarship. Their journey takes them to the English countryside and France as they unearth old letters and journals that weave the story of this previously unknown romance.

A simple plot summary does not even begin to do justice to this multi-layered novel. Byatt's narrator presents the parallel stories of the present-day scholars and their Victorian subjects through a variety of literary forms, including poetry, letters, diary entries and fairy tales. This postmodern romance also tackles some interesting themes, such as the nature of literary biography and scholarship in light of our incomplete access to the full truth about the stories of authors' lives. Yet for all its intellectualism and wealth of literary allusions, the narrative of Possession seldom lags, and you will soon find yourself wrapped up in the mystery surrounding Ash and LaMotte, which increasingly consumes Maud and Roland. Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize.

Cabell Library PR6052.Y2 P6 1990

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

This fascinating novel proves that you don't have to like the characters in order to like a book. A Confederacy of Dunces is highly comedic in its gross caricatures of New Orleans citizens. The main character is Ignatius Reilly, an obnoxious, obese freeloader who, though a middle-aged man, still lives at home with his equally unlikable alcoholic mother. Ignatius imagines himself to be a philosopher and reformer, so when he is forced to get a job, he attempts to galvanize workers to complain about workplace conditions (he names this campaign a "Crusade for Moorish Dignity"). When this plan goes awry and he is fired, he gets a job as a hot dog street vendor where he eats many more hot dogs than he sells and again fails in his revolutionary attempts. He eventually must flee the city to avoid being committed to an asylum.

The story behind this book's publication is as interesting as the novel itself. John Kennedy Toole failed to have it published, and committed suicide in 1969. For the next several years, his mother's attempts to find a publisher was unsuccessful until she insisted on showing it to Walker Percy (The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman) who was teaching at Loyola in New Orleans. Although he was reluctant to read it, he was quickly convinced that it should be published and sent it to Louisiana State University Press. When it was published in 1980, it became an immediate success, both literary and commercial, and even won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

Cabell Library PS3570.O54 C66 2000

Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

Beatnik and counter-culture icon Tom Robbins has published 8 novels and a number of popular short stories in which he irreverently looks at institutions and societies from his own enhanced perspective. You can rely on him to bring unusual issues and characters to the forefront in each and every story or book, but his first book, Another Roadside Attraction, offers the most entertaining insights into the thought-processes of some uniquely American movements. Since it was a first attempt, the book does not flow as well as his later and more polished works, especially the best-selling Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (great book, avoid the movie). But Robbins has some important, not to mention outlandish, things to say in this book, arguably to a greater extent than his other novels. If anything, the bits of rather raw writing work into the overall feeling that you are experiencing something as it takes shape instead of just being told a story. I'm not sure I would recommend this as an introduction to Robbins's work (Cowgirls is probably better there), but if you have read other Robbins works but skipped this one then you should pick it up. And if you are not familiar with his work but are in the mood to have your vision of the world expanded, try Cowgirls and then I think you'll run out to taste Another Roadside Attraction.

Cabell Library PS3568.O233 Various Locations

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

I can't remember how many times I read this book as a child—but I do remember being fascinated by this tale of independence and survival. When a group of Russian hunters arrives at a remote island and kills many of its inhabitants, those remaining decide to abandon the island. As the ship sails away the narrator, Karana, notices that her young brother is still on the island. Hysterical, she jumps overboard and returns to shore and together they prepare to survive alone until another ship returns for them. Her brother is killed the next day by wild dogs, and Karana spends the next several years in solitude on the island. She encounters many dangers, including wild dogs, hunters, an earthquake, an octopus, and a tidal wave. While her life is dangerous, she also learns survival skills—she makes weapons, builds a house and fence, builds and mends a canoe, and makes her own clothes. Both the day-to-day aspects of a solitary life, and the dangerous adventures she encounters makes this a fascinating book for late elementary and middle school students, but on rereading it, I can say that it is a great quick read for adults as well. Island of the Blue Dolphins won the 1961 Newbery Medal.

Cabell Library Juvenile Literature PZ7 .O237 I75

Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

Scorched Earth, a stark deviation from Robbins's highly regarded books set in World War II, is a modern Southern novel reminiscent of early 20th century works by authors such as Ellen Glasgow and William Faulkner. The compelling story follows a number of colorful characters in a Virginia town where a series of tragic events forces the spotlight on Old South concepts of race, religion, society, and politics still lingering beneath the surface in the face of a younger population with much more modern views. Robbins, a lawyer in addition to author, takes an intriguing look at social and political structures through a realistic and entertaining array of criminal investigations, court trials, and illicit small town relationships.

Cabell Library PS3568.O22289 S28 2002

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Atonement begins in England during the time period between the first and second World Wars. It is centered on three characters: thirteen-year-old Briony, an aspiring writer, her older sister Cecilia who recently returned home after three years at Cambridge, and their next-door-neighbor and Cecilia's childhood friend, Robbie. From an upstairs window, young Briony observes a surprising encounter between Cecilia and Robbie: they appear to fight and then Cecilia submerges herself in a large fountain. Briony feels threatened by this and wonders about Robbie's motives. Later that evening, she falsely accuses him of a crime, as she is convinced that he is a dangerous maniac. The story then jumps forward to World War II, as Briony tries to atone for what she now realizes was a case of mistaken identity, while struggling with the guilt she feels about forever altering the lives of Cecilia, Robbie, and the rest of her family.

Atonement was a 2003 ALA Notable Book and won the WH Smith Literary Award (2002) and the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003).

Cabell Library PR6063.C4 A86 2001

Reviewed by Monique Prince

This book has a little bit of everything—humor, politics, religion, friendship, mystery, drama, setting, and richly described characters. It is narrated by John Wheelwright as an adult, reflecting on his childhood friendship with Owen Meany. Owen is a tiny person who speaks in a loud, high voice (in all capital letters) and who kills John's mother with a foul ball during a little league baseball game. Owen doesn't view this tragedy as an accident. Everything, he believes, happens for a reason and he comes to view himself as "God's instrument," destined to live for one pivotal moment which will give his life meaning. This book is about events leading up to that moment as the two boys grow up and face the prospect of the Vietnam War.

If you have read other Irving novels, you will recognize some familiar elements: New Hampshire, Exeter, and wrestling; other Irving elements, such as bears, circuses, Vienna, and amputations are thankfully omitted. This is, in my opinion, the best John Irving novel to date, and I highly recommend it.

Cabell Library PS3559.R8 P7 1997

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

October 16-22 is Teen Read Week, so what better book to recommend than The Catcher in the Rye, widely considered to be the quintessential American coming-of-age novel. It is narrated by Holden Caufield, a teenager who gets expelled from a prep school and spends a couple days in New York City deciding what do to next. Throughout the novel, his cynicism contrasts with his strong desire to hold onto the innocence of childhood for himself and others—the loss of which results in "phony" adulthood. His concern is evident in the way he acts protective towards his younger sister and childhood friend, as well as the symbolism of the title itself; he wants to be someone who protects children from falling over a cliff into adulthood (a catcher in a rye field, drawing from the song lyric "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye"). This resistance to leaving youth is surprising since Holden's own childhood was far from idyllic—he is still trying to cope with the loss of his brother to leukemia and his parents' emotional distance. The Catcher in the Rye is a classic with a lot of depth, but it is also a quick read. Even if you read this one in high school, it is worth another look; your own perspective and life experiences will color your impression of this book in a different way each time you read it.

Cabell Library PS3537.A426 C3 Various Locations

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Based on a Johannes Vermeer painting from 1665, Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictional account of this mysterious piece of art dubbed "The Dutch Mona Lisa." The story takes place in Delft, a small but vibrant Dutch city where Vermeer spent his entire life. Griet is a young girl who is sent to work as a maid in his household which included his wife, mother-in-law, five children, and housekeeper. Griet is intrigued by Vermeer, a quiet and reclusive man. Because she has an eye for art, he begins to teach her about his processes and allows her to help grind paints, mix colors, and work with background objects, although they conceal these activities from others in the house. When Vermeer's patron insists that he use Griet as a model for his next painting, suspicion and jealousy, as well as a subtle undertone of attraction between artist and subject, force Griet to make a difficult choice that will impact the rest of her life.

A feature of this book that is particularly enjoyable is the artistic details, particularly of color and light, used to describe the city and its residents. In one vivid scene, Griet is at her parents' house and is chopping vegetables for a soup when Vermeer and his wife arrive. She explains, "I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots, and turnips." As Vermeer probes her about how she decided where to place them, he says "I see you have separated the whites...And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?" She replies, "The colors fight when they are side by side, sir." Such descriptive imagery is what makes this book especially memorable.

Cabell Library PS3553.H4367 G57 1999

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." So begins The Blind Assassin, a story of two sisters, one of whom dies young, yet is still revered by devout fans of her posthumously-published novel. Laura Chase's sister Iris is left to live among the fallout caused by both Laura's death and the publication of her "scandalous" novel. The story presented to the reader is told by an elderly Iris, who shares a rather cynical and detached account of their childhood, her coerced marriage to an older husband, and the subsequent downfall of the once-prosperous Chase family. Iris's musings shift seamlessly between past and present, and interspersed among her story are excerpts from Laura's novel, The Blind Assassin. Atwood's novel-within-a-novel approach provides just enough clues to read between the lines of Iris's tale, leading the reader along at a measured pace to the ultimate "AHA!" moment of realization of what really happened during those years prior to Laura's death. When I finished this book, I put it down with a stunned "wow." The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize.

Cabell Library PR9199.3.A8 B55 2000

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Another favorite Banned Book is Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Set in depression-era Alabama, it is both an endearing story about two children and their father, and a compelling examination of Southern race relations. Atticus Finch is a defense attorney with two young children, Scout and her older brother Jem. As an adult, Scout narrates the story of her childhood spent trailing after Jem and their summer friend Dill. One summer, their father is asked to defend Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a poor white woman. Atticus is criticized by many for taking the case seriously; his commitment to justice and equality in the face of threats and insults is a lasting lesson to his young daughter who idolizes him.

Cabell Library PS3562.E353 Various Locations

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Set in antebellum Virginia, in fictional Manchester County, The Known World is a 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner and debut novel by Edward P. Jones. It examines the paradoxical circumstances surrounding a free black class that owns slaves. The book opens with the death of freed slave Henry Townsend, who owns a plantation and 33 slaves. Responsibility for operating the plantation is left to his wife, Caldonia and before long, things begin to fall apart. Slaves escape, free blacks are resold into slavery, and masters and slaves grow increasingly suspicious of each other. This is a highly intricate novel--the reader is introduced not only to the Townsends, but to their parents, most of their slaves, their teacher, Henry's former owner, neighbors, the white law enforcement officers patrolling the county, and several others. Despite the breadth of characters presented, rarely are they purely good or purely evil--even Henry's former master who often treated his slaves harshly is depicted as a doting father to his children and lifelong mentor to Henry. To explain how free blacks viewed slave ownership, one character comments "It is not the same as owning people in your own family. It is not the same at all...All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. No one of us who believes in the law and God does more than that...We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."

Cabell Library PS3560.O4813 K58 2003

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

The best word to describe Gilead is peaceful. It is a slow-moving, meandering novel written as a letter from an elderly father to his young son, to be read when the son reaches adulthood. It recounts events from four generations of Ames living in Gilead, Iowa--primarily focusing on the fathers who have all been clergymen. Reverend John Ames writes to his son about his Abolitionist grandfather, who came to Iowa from Maine to fight slavery, and who served in the Civil War as a Union chaplain when he was fifty years old. Ames also describes his pacifist father who struggled to make peace with his own father, a polar opposite. He records details of his life in the present--observations about his young wife and son, internal turmoil about how to respond to his best friend's wayward son, and the process of aging and preparing for death. Over all of these threads is the narrator's beautifully expressed love for and appreciation of life as a precious gift. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and 2004 Book Critics Circle Award.

Cabell Library PS3568.O3125 G55 2004

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

I love books with fun titles. It sounds very impressive (in my librarian's mind) to drop fun-titled books into conversations about reading. The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time is one of those books, and what is even better is that the plot is as quirky as the title. It's quick and light, but educational at the same time, as it is the first book I've read or heard of that was written from the perspective of an autistic child. Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism characterized by obsessive interests (in Christopher's case, science and math), an extremely literal interpretation of the world, and an inability to relate emotionally to others. When his neighbor's dog Wellington is murdered, Christopher decides to solve the mystery. In the process he uncovers information about his neighbors and family, and he conveys these details and his understanding of events--including those that are very emotional--in a detached, strikingly unemotional voice that makes for very interesting reading. The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time won the 2003 Whitbread book prize and was a 2004 ALA Notable Book.

Cabell Library PR6058 .A245 C87 2003

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

If you liked Bridget Jones's Diary then you'd probably also enjoy Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, also by Helen Fielding. If you loved Bridget Jones's Diary, you might be slightly disappointed by Fielding's most recent effort. That said, I enjoyed this novel, and although it is the literary equivalent of a "chick flick," it also contained a surprising amount of dramatic rescues, crime-fighting, and James Bond-esque spy gadgets. The story opens as Olivia Joules, a British reporter (recently demoted from international to style coverage) for the Sunday Times arrives in Miami for a face cream reception. While surrounded by several "actresses slash models," she meets a mysterious, wealthy, exotic movie producer she is simultaneously attracted to and suspicious of, as she thinks he bears a striking resemblance to a known terrorist. When a Google name search yields no results and she witnesses a shocking disaster linked to al-Qaeda, she is convinced he is hiding something. Olivia then follows him to Los Angeles and beyond in a quest to discover whether he is in fact a terrorist or merely a man falling in love with her. One aspect of the book that is particularly appealing is Fielding's depiction of Olivia Joules as an independent, intelligent woman well-versed in international politics while at the same time retaining the fun-loving, hyper-analytical, slightly silly personality so wonderfully depicted in the character of Bridget Jones. (Which reminds me, I also recommend both Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequel, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason).

Cabell Library PR6056.I4588 O44 2004

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls is simply one of the most amazing novels I have ever read. I discovered it at a book sale and picked it up because of the attractive cover. Although I hadn't heard of Richard Russo before, and thought I'd made a unique discovery, I was surprised to find that he is widely considered to be among the best contemporary novelists. While many authors sacrifice plot and focus on character development, or vice versa, Empire Falls is a masterful blend of both. Richard Russo delves into the lives of several blue collar characters in Empire Falls, a fictional Maine town. While it was once home to a thriving textile and manufacturing empire owned by the Whiting family, Empire Falls is now a town in the shadow of better days. The central character is Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill. The Empire Grill is owned by Mrs. Whiting, the sole remaining Whiting estate heir who has implied that she will one day bequeath the restaurant to Miles. In the meantime, he waits and struggles with various family dynamics--his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her future husband, his daughter's struggles at school, working with his brother to improve the Grill, memories of his mother's relationship with the Whiting family, and the constant confusion surrounding Mrs. Whiting and her true motives. Russo develops all of these subplots and secondary characters and weaves them together into a story that is at once humorous and heartrending.

Cabell Library PS3568 .U812 E4 2001b

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

The Shipping News, winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is truly a literary masterpiece. At its center is Quoyle, an awkward, lonely newspaperman who takes his two daughters to his ancestral home in a small town on the Newfoundland coast to start a job at the Gammy Bird, the local newspaper. While writing about car wrecks, the shipping news (records of what ships come and go), and shipwrecks, Quoyle learns about his family's history and develops friendships with the other newspapermen and townspeople. Significantly, it is in this cold, remote fishing village where Quoyle finally experiences a new life which forces him to face his past, his fears, and his insecurities and look to a more promising future.

Cabell Library PS3566 .R697 S4

Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

VCU alumna Sheri Reynolds writes a poignant novel from the point of view of Ninah Huff, a girl coming of age in an isolated southern religious community led by her grandfather, the founder of the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind. The Rapture of Canaan was a 1997 Oprah Book Club pick, and describes the past and future of this community and its founder. Squarely in the Southern Gothic literary tradition, this novel culminates with a series of events, perhaps even a miracle, which force Ninah to face the realities of the community and make difficult choices for herself and those who depend on her. The community has its own personality within which its members, all well-developed characters, must reconcile their own.

Cabell Library PS3568 .E8975 R36 1995

Reviewed by Curtis Lyons, Head, Special Collections and Archives

Richmond author James Branch Cabell was catapulted to national prominence when the State of New York unsuccessfully attempted to ban his book Jurgen in 1920. Jurgen is Cabell's simultaneous indictment and defense of the conventions of love, marriage, and sex, complete with very thinly veiled sexual symbolism (very tame by today's standards).

Jurgen, a monstrous clever fellow, is a middle-aged pawn-broker who believes he could have been so much more as he sets off in search of his ensorcelled wife, taken from him in response to an ill-fated remark he made to a stranger. Along the way he is helped and hindered by the likes of Merlin, Helen of Troy, Grandfather Satan, Queen Guinevere, and many other figures from the canon of western literature and is allowed to relive his youth and the lives and loves that he missed out on the first time around.

Cabell is in the satiric tradition of Cervantes, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Swift and was a major influence on Robert Heinlein and Neil Gaiman. You can read more about Cabell and his works at theVCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives online exhibit.

Cabell Library PS3505 .A153 J8 (Multiple Copies in Stacks and Special Collections and Archives. Check VCU Libraries Catalog for holdings information)

Full Text of Jurgen from Documenting the American South

Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian

Charming Billy (1998) is this year's GO READ selection. It won the National Book Award and was a 1999 ALA Notable Book. The story opens as a group of Irish Americans are gathered in a Bronx bar following the funeral of main character Billy Lynch. What follows is an exploration of lost love, nostalgia, and betrayal as Billy's life story is pieced together in the following hours. Throughout his adult life, Billy struggled with alcoholism, traced to his cousin Dennis's revelation that his fiance in Ireland had died. Despite his lifelong sorrow and alcoholism, Billy married and was known to his friends and family as a romantic, a charmer. As a friend explained, "If you knew Billy at all," he said, "then you loved him. He was just that type of guy."

Consider reading Charming Billy in the coming weeks, and join others at VCU for book discussions and special events throughout the fall semester. See the GO READ VCU website for more information.

Cabell Library PS3563 .C355 C48