♦=newest addition
♦The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
This collection of essays came out earlier this year and I’ve been wanting to read it. Came across it in a bookstore and finally bought it and lodged it in the reading table pile. It tells the true story of Batuman’s intellectual adventures with Russian literature and grad school. It got rave reviews and likely will show up at year’s end on the “best of the year” lists.
♦In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of Andrais Vajda by Stephen Vizinczey
A classic novel first published in 1965 and out of print until its reissue this year by Penguin Classics. From the dust jacket of the 1965 edition: “…Stephen Vizinczey recounts the amours and adventures of his young hero in a picaresque novel about love which is both funny and truthful, a minor masterpiece of serious comedy that will remind readers of Nabokov and Stendhal.”
♦Girl By the Road at Night by David Rabe
Rabe’s first work of fiction set in Vietnam, “a spare and poetic narrative about a young soldier embarking on a tour of duty and the Vietnamese prostitue he meets in country” (from the dust jacket). Rabe is a celebrated playwright known for his early plays on the Vietnam war.
Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten
Inter-related stories in which the author appears. From back-of-the-book: “Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters — two lovers — meet, part, and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic.” Tuten’s book will be published in September 2010.
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
A small book from Yale University Press I’ve been meaning to read because I believe it’s important we continue to bring books of literature from around the world into English. Also, as I struggled to find a translation of War and Peace that worked for me, I became aware of the significant role of the translator.
Driftless by David Rhodes
Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “The best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.” In 1976, David Rhodes life changed tragically and dramatically in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He stopped published for three decades. Driftless is his return about contemporary life in rural America.
Drowned Boy by Jerry Gabriel
A collection of eight linked stories set in Moraine, Ohio. Winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
A Word of Love by Elizabeth Bowen
This 1955 novel by the classic Anglo-Irish short-story writer and novelist came to me when searching the stacks of a used bookstore. The Oxford Companion to English Literature says “her works … strike the reader with a powerful sense of period, through their accurate detail and keen response to atmosphere.”
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch
An acclaimed biography published in 2009. This quote by O’Connor is from the dust jacket: “My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” Also, from the dust jacket: “[Gooch] reveals this canonical American writer to us in all her profundity and humanity.”
The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors by Al Silverman
I’m partway through this recollection about editors and publishers from the 1940s to the early 1980s. A fascinating look-back at publishing of yesteryear that may be of most interest to those in the industry or hardcore bibliophiles.
Birds of America by Mary McCarthy
Published in 1977, this novel is about Peter Levi, a young American man studying at the Sorbonne. It’s on my RT out of curiosity because Peter “tries to live his daily student life according to Kant’s dicta, hoping that his will may have the force of a natural law,” as written on the dust jacket.
Night by Elie Wiesel
I have a bookshelf filled with Holocaust literature, including other books by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wiesel. I even heard Wiesel speak in Columbus a few years ago, but I haven’t read this best-selling memoir about his horrifying experience in Auschwitz.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
A 2003 best-seller I still haven’t found time to read about a Chicago librarian who suffers from a rare disorder that makes him a time traveler. It’s listed in the February 15, 2010, Library Journal among the “books most borrowed in U.S. libraries.” So, it’s back on the RT.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Please read the TLC post Hans Fallada’s must read masterpiece.
The Little Girl and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Published in 1924, I found this collection in a used bookstore. Mansfield is considered to be one of the best short stories writers of the early 20th Century.
