UGA Libraries News & Events

New Fiction at the UGA Libraries (3/31)

Map of the Invisible World, by Tash Aw
PR6101.W2 M37 2009

From the author of the internationally acclaimed, Costa Award-winning The Harmony Silk Factory comes an enthralling new novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent and often frightening world. 16-year-old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his older brother, Johan, were abandoned by their mother as children; he watched as Johan was adopted and taken away by a wealthy couple; and he had to hide when Karl, the Dutch man who raised him, was arrested by soldiers during Sukarno’s drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past. Adam sets out on a quest to find Karl, but all he has to guide him are some old photos and letters, which send him to the colourful, dangerous capital, Jakarta. Johan, meanwhile, is living a seemingly carefree, privileged life in Malaysia, but is careening out of control, unable to forget the long-ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother. Map of the Invisible World is a masterful novel, and confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.

Savage Lands, by Clare Clark
PR6103.L3725 S28 2010

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.

Wild Child: Stories, by T.C. Boyle
PS3552.O932 W53 2010

With trademark imagination, T.C. Boyle presents a collection of fourteen short stories. In the volume’s title story, Victor, a feral boy in Napoleonic France, is captured and is introduced to civilization for the first time. However it is the child’t captors that end up learning the most about humanity and civility.

Point Omega: A Novel by Don DeLillo
PS3554.E4425 P65 2010

Three unusual people–”defense intellectual” Richard Elster, who was involved in the management of the country’s war machine; young documentary filmmaker Jim Finley, who is intent on documenting Elster’s experience; and Elster’s daughter Jessica, who behaves like an “otherworldly” woman from New York–train their binoculars on the desert landscape of California and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.

Shadow Tag: A Novel, by Louise Erdrich
PS3555.R42 S53 2010

Chronciles the emotional war between Irene America, a beautiful, introspective woman of Native American ancestry, struggling to finish her dissertation while raising three children, and her husband Gil, a painter whose reputation is built on a series of now iconic portraits of Irene.

36 arguments for the existence of God: a work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein
PS3557.O398 A615 2010

Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind.

At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. He’s been dubbed “the atheist with a soul,” and his sudden celebrity has upended his life. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum–“the goddess of game theory”–and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. But he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. The rush of events in a single dramatic week plays out Cass’s conviction that the religious impulse spills out into life at large.

In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel.

A Fair Maiden, by Joyce Carol Oates
PS3565.A8 F34 2010

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spiva is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she’s approached by silver-haired, gentlemanly Marcus Kidder, a local resident of some renown. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

The financial lives of the poets: a novel, by Jess Walter
PS3573.A4722834 F56 2009

In the winning and utterly original novels Citizen Vince and The Zero, Jess Walter (“a ridiculously talented writer”—New York Times) painted an America all his own: a land of real, flawed, and deeply human characters coping with the anxieties of their times. Now, in his warmest, funniest, and best novel yet, Walter offers a story as real as our own lives: a tale of overstretched accounts, misbegotten schemes, and domestic dreams deferred.

A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea—and his wife’s eBay resale business— ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife’s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana?

Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems?

Following Matt in his weeklong quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin—and how we can begin to make our way back.

Literture, by Catfish Karkowsky
PS3611 .A7834 2009

A debut collection of short shorts with focus on celebration of self-imposed dementia, the re-emergence of ethics married to aesthetics, the rhythm in preponderant laughter, the roles and postures of stories in absurd life, and the peculiar quiddity of a well-told toilet joke. Each story offers at least one goofy character for the reader’s appraisal: to judge, to be judged, to laugh at, to love, to have that love laughed at.

The Listener: A Novel by Shira Nayman
PS3614.A96 L57 2010

It is 1947 and Dr. Harrison, chief psychiatrist at the private asylum Shadowbrook, is treating a mysterious patient, Bertram, who has voluntarily come to the hospital. As treatment of Bertram progresses, Dr. Harrison begins to lose control of his objectivity and makes questionable decisions that may lead to self-destruction.