UGA Libraries News & Events

New Fiction at the Libraries, May 5

A State of Mind by Kevin Casey
PR6053.A814 S75 2009

When English author William Cromer and his German lover Ingrid move to the Old Rectory nearby, their lives are transformed and an alcohol-fuelled affair begins. Hughes puts at risk everything he has ever loved – his wife and daughter and their quiet corner of Ireland. Nationalist resentment of this tax-free haven enjoyed by foreigners is sparked by events in Northern Ireland, and John finds himself in the middle of extortion, blackmail, marital betrayal, and a suicide. As old and new friendships unravel, even lunchtime visits to the local pub become points of attrition. Losing his friends and mistress, John is forced to take responsibility for his actions in order to save his family and his integrity, and to find release as a writer.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
PS3562.I648 A85 2010

Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major “ask”—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap.

Probing many themes — or, perhaps, anxieties — including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.

True Confections: A novel by Katharine Weber
PS3573.E2194 T78 2009

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider’s perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber.

Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis.

Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip’s history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice’s vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Côte d’Ivoire and the Third Reich’s failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews.

Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein
PR6058.U738 A67 2009

Usman and Lydia meet in postwar London and fall in love. But as the years flit by, Usman feels a growing distance between them. When he realizes that he hasn’t noticed the buds of the gulmohar tree unfurl, he understands that he has lost sight of his love for his wife.

Drowned Boy by Jerry Gabriel
PS3607.A255 D76 2010

Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In “Boys Industrial School,” two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment––set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
PR9199.3.E26 D57 2009

Anne Greeves is sixteen years old when she first meets Serey, a Cambodian student and musician forced by his family to leave his country during the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime. Swept up in the fury and infatuation of first love, Anne rebels against her father’s wishes and embraces her relationship with Serey…But then the borders of Cambodia are reopened and Serey must risk his life to return home, alone, in search of his family. A decade later, Anne will travel halfway around the world to find him, and to save their relationship from the same tragic forces that first brought them together…

The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner
PS3615.C48 R87 2010

Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum’s director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like she might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of Azade, Olga and even Mircha, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.

Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni; translated by Anthea Bell
PT2661.R45 C5413 2009

2064 – Securely fenced off from the rest of the world, life in Euroasia, except for a handful of suicide bombings and border disputes, is constantly improving. On the other side of the fence, countries are being exploited and wracked by regression, dictatorship, and religious fanaticism. People live in poverty and misery.

Max Schwartzwald is the owner of Chez Max, a smart Parisian restaurant, but he is also an Ashcroft agent, a member of a secret government organisation whose mission is to promptly identify and weed out anything that may threaten the political status quo.

Schwartzwald’s biggest problem is his Ashcroft partner, Chen Wu, a self-righteous loudmouth, who leaves no taboo unbroken, attacks every human weakness and takes liberties at will – all because of the spectacular successes he has achieved within the organisation.

But is Chen a double agent who is bringing illegal immigrants into the Euroasian world and is this the opportunity for Max to get rid of his partner once and for all?

Director’s Cut: A novel by Arthur Japin.
PT5881.2.A59 D7613 2010

A tale of consuming love and artistic creation—based on a true story—that reimagines the last romance of the legendary filmmaker Federico Fellini.

In Director’s Cut we enter the mind of Snaporaz, the lion of Italian cinema, as he slips into a coma in his final days. Having always drawn inspiration from the world of his dreams, he welcomes the chance to take account of his life, and in particular his most recent love affair, with a beautiful but perilously highstrung actress called Gala.

Lured by the glamour of Rome, Gala and her boyfriend Maxim, an actor as well, are hoping to be discovered when they manage the impossible: entrée to the studio of the great master. Almost at once and despite an age difference of four decades, a mutual enthrallment develops between Snaporaz and Gala, leaving Maxim an anxious observer of Gala’s physical and spiritual destruction, as she falls down a rabbit hole of self-delusion that will lead her both to prostitution and self-cloistering in an abandoned church. Snaporaz’s intoxicatingly baroque—Felliniesque—account of the affair slyly challenges us again and again to ask what is dream and what is reality, and to conclude that the difference is irrelevant when such a genius immerses himself in his most natural element: the imagination.

Boy by Takeshi Kitano; translated by David James Karashima
PL846.I762 S5613 2007

A collection of three short stories features two brothers at a school sports day, another pair of brothers who use astronomy to cope with the loss of their father, and an uncool teenage boy who meets a biker girl in Kyoto.

English by Wang Gang; translated from the Chinese by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan
PL2965.G36 Y5613 2009

During the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution, a twelve-year-old boy named Love Liu wonders what life is like beyond the region of Xinjiang in China’s remote northwest. Here, conformity is valued above all else, and suspicion governs every exchange among neighbors, classmates, and even friends. Into this stifling atmosphere comes a tall, clean-shaven teacher from Shanghai, with an elegant gray wool jacket and an English dictionary tucked under his arm.

With the dictionary at his disposal, Love Liu throws himself into learning English, and a whole new world opens up for him. But in an atmosphere of accusation and recrimination, one in which the teacher is deemed morally suspect and mere innuendo can cost someone his life, Love Liu’s ideals face a test more challenging than any he’ll meet in the classroom.