UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Libraries, June 23

Smile as They Bow: A novel by Nu Nu Yi; translated from the Burmese by Alfred Birnbaum and Thi Thi Aye.
PL3988.Y524 S65 2008

Over the past twenty years, Nu Nu Yi has become one of Burma’s most acclaimed authors–and in 2007, she became the first person living in Burma to be nominated for an international literary award. Smile as They Bow was censored for more than twelve years by the Burmese government. It is fitting, then, that this is her American debut.

As the weeklong Taungbyon Festival draws near, thousands of villagers from all regions of Burma descend upon a tiny hamlet near Mandalay to pay respect to the spirits, known as nats, which are central to Burmese tradition. At the heart of these festivities is Daisy Bond, a gay, transvestite spiritual medium in his fifties. With his sharp tongue and vivid performances, he has long been revered as one of the festival’s most illustrious natkadaws. At his side is Min Min, his young assistant and lover, who endures unyielding taunts and abuse from his fiery boss. But when a young beggar girl named Pan Nyo threatens to steal Min Min’s heart, the outrageous Daisy finds himself face-to-face with his worst fears. Written in lyrical, intoxicating prose, Smile as They Bow is, like the works of Arundhati Roy and Ha Jin, an unexpectedly whimsical, illuminating, and above all revealing portrayal of a culture few Westerners have ever witnessed.

Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison; edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley.
PS3555.L625 T57 2010

Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, this story is a multi-generational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting U.S. senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia.

At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man.  Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic.

Three Days Before the Shooting gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published.  Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech.

Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison’s achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death forty years later. Three Days Before the Shooting is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.

A Leap by Anna Enquist; translated by Jeannette K. Ringold.
PT5881.15.N68 S6713 2009

Short fictional works in the form of dramatic monologues feature such characters as Alma Mahler, the wife of the composer, who describes how she abandoned her own musical career to serve her husband.

The Man Who Guarded the Bomb: Stories by Gregory Orfalea
PS3565.R427 M36 2010

A boy finds himself alone with his first love in a toboggan stalled atop the Matterhorn at Disneyland. A woman, bitter about her marriage to a man turned blind, must decide if he lives or dies. A man haunted by his role in creating the H-bomb suddenly disappears in old age, only to turn up at Alamagordo, seeking an Indian and redemption. Such characters, at the crossroads of emotion and ethics, confounding loss and resurrection, populate this unforgettable collection of tales. Loosely connected, the stories chronicle the lives of the Matters, a captivating, tragic, yet ultimately exultant Arab American family. Spanning continents and a century, the stories center on the balm that human relationships offer. In “The Chandelier”, a boy desperate to feed his starving family hauls a stolen chandelier over a snowy mountain in Lebanon during World War I. A young Mexican nurse and her lover wind their way through eighteenth-century California missions in “Fabiola”. Against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks, an Arab American man is thrown from a bus, echoing past racial discriminations, in “Get Off the Bus”. With a poet’s ear and a historian’s keen eye for detail, Orfalea offers readers beautifully crafted stories filled with flawed yet irresistible characters who are rendered with great tenderness and aching complexity.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad; translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad.
PT8951.29.O5 E4413 2008

Bjørn Hansen has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that pure chance has ruled his life. Novel 11, Book 18 is an uncompromising and concentrated existential novel which earned Dag Solstad his second Norwegian Critics’ Prize.

A Florentine Death by Michele Giuttari; translated by Howard Curtis.
PQ4867.I7998 F56 2007

Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara knows that the beautiful surface of his adopted city, Florence, hides dark undercurrents. When called in to investigate a series of brutal and apparently random murders, his intuition is confirmed. Distrusted by his superiors and pilloried by the media, Ferrara finds time running out as the questions pile up. Is there a connection between the murders and the threatening letters he has received? Are his old enemies, the Calabrian Mafia, involved? And what part is played by a beautiful young woman facing a heart-rending decision, a priest troubled by a secret from his past, and an American journalist fascinated by the darker side of life? Ferrara confronts the murky underbelly of Florence in an investigation that will put not only his career but also his life on the line.