UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction in the Libraries, June 30

Burning Bright:  Stories by Ron Rash
PS3568.A698 B87 2010

Few writers know the heart and soul of a region as does Ron Rash. Like William Faulkner’s Mississippi or Ivan Doig’s Montana, Rash’s Appalachia is a dichotomous land of beauty and brutality settled by characters as remarkable and enduring as the mountains and hollows they call home. In this rich collection, the acclaimed author limns this territory in stories breathtaking in voice and power.

In “Corpse Bird,” a man becomes haunted by a childhood folk tale when a mysterious bird makes its home in his neighbor’s tree and their daughter suddenly takes ill. In “Back of Beyond,” a pawn shop owner who profits from the stolen goods of local meth addicts—including his own nephew—comes to his brother’s aid when he’s threatened by his son. The pregnant wife of a Lincoln sympathizer alone in Confederate territory takes revenge to protect her family from a menacing wayward soldier in “Lincolnites.”

Rash masterfully crafts a patchwork of luminous stories, rich in beauty, suspense, and violence, that draw from the mythical, mysterious, and rawness of the people and the landscape of Appalachia.

That Far Away Look by Michael G. Moran
PS3613.O68195 T43 2009

Mitch Antaglia, a power forward on Georgia Central University’s basketball team, has gone missing, and Nick Stirling, a PI out of Atlanta, has been hired to find him. The missing person case quickly turns grisly when two women close to Mitch are discovered with their throats slashed. Following leads that take him from a small college town to Atlanta and then to rural Kansas, Stirling unearths a family secret steeped in insanity and violence.

February by Lisa Moore
PR9199.3.M647 F43 2009

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O’Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. It begins in the present-day, but spirals back again and again to the February that persists in Helen’s mind and heart.

In her external life, Helen O’Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal. Then, one night she gets a phone call: her son John is coming home. He has made a girl pregnant after a brief, sex-filled week in Iceland. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen comes to terms with her need to remember the dead.

Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters’ physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile. A profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.

Jealousy by Catherine Millet; translated by Helen Stevenson.
PQ2673.I3368 Z4613 2009

The Sexual Life of Catherine M, Catherine Millet’s analysis of the many forms and flavors of sexual pleasure, was internationally admired, and not just for its literary qualities. The audacity of a sex life well lived and thoroughly examined left readers wondering how she managed to pull it off while sustaining her relationship with life partner, writer Jacques Henric. ‘I had love at home’ she explained. ‘I sought only pleasure in the world outside’. Then one day she discovered a letter lying about the apartment, from which it became clear that Jacques was involved elsewhere. Jealousy details the crisis provoked by this discovery and her reaction to it. If The Sexual Life of Catherine M seemed to disregard emotion, Jealousy is its radical complement: the paradoxical confession of a libertine, who succumbs to the ‘timeless and universal malady’.

Berlin Poplars by Anne B. Ragde; translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson.
PT8951.28.A34 B47 2008

An engrossing, dark comedy brought vividly to life through extraordinary characters. While perfectly in tune with their professions the Neshov sons as a family are little short of dysfunctional. This is a novel of a sense of belonging and the family farm defines this, with its power to draw people back to their roots.

The Locked Room by Maj Slöwall and Per Wahlöö; translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin.
PT9876.29.J63 S5413 2009

From its classic premise, The Locked Room accelerates into an engrossing novel of the mind. Exploring the ramifications of egotism and intellect, luck and accident, and set against the backdrop of the inspired deductions and monstrous errors of Martin Beck and the Stockholm Homicide Squad, this tour de force of detection bears the unmistakable substance and gravity of real life.