UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction in the Libraries, Sept 22

Everything Asian by Sung J. Woo
PS3623.O6225 E94 2009

You’re twelve years old. A month has passed since your Korean Air flight landed at lovely Newark Airport. Your fifteen-year-old sister is miserable. Your mother isn’t exactly happy, either. You’re seeing your father for the first time in five years, and although he’s nice enough, he might be, well–how can you put this delicately?–a loser. You can’t speak English, but that doesn’t stop you from working at East Meets West, your father’s gift shop in a strip mall, where everything is new. Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim.

Pythagoras’ Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery by Arturo Sangalli
PS3619.A566 P97 2009

The celebrated mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras left no writings. But what if he had and the manuscript was never found? Where would it be located? And what information would it reveal? These questions are the inspiration for the mathematical mystery novel Pythagoras’ Revenge. Suspenseful and instructive, Pythagoras’ Revenge weaves fact, fiction, mathematics, computer science, and ancient history into an entertaining story.

Jule Davidson, a young American mathematician, answers difficult math riddles on the Internet and stumbles upon a neo-Pythagorean sect searching for the promised reincarnation of Pythagoras. Across the ocean, Elmer Galway, a professor of classical history at Oxford, discovers an Arabic manuscript hinting at the existence of an ancient scroll–possibly left by Pythagoras himself. Unknown to one another, Jule and Elmer each have information that the other requires and, as they race to solve the philosophical and mathematical puzzles set before them, their paths ultimately collide. Set in 1998 with flashbacks to classical Greece, Pythagoras’ Revenge investigates the confrontation between opposing views of mathematics and reality, and explores ideas from both early and cutting-edge mathematics.

From academic Oxford to suburban Chicago and historic Rome, Pythagoras’ Revenge is a sophisticated thriller that will grip readers from beginning to surprising end.

Symphony in White by Adriana Lisboa
Translated from the Portuguese by Sarah Green.
PQ9698.422.I73 S5613 2010

The two daughters of Afonso Oli­mpio and Otaca­lia raised in rural Brazil in the 1960s and educated in teeming Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s form the counterpoint and central theme linking four generations: the pliant, troubled Clarice and the lovely, strong-willed Maria Ines.
As other voices join in–those of the men they have married and the ones they have loved; the artist manque Tomas; villagers and childhood friends; Great-Aunt Berenice in Rio; Eduarda, Maria Ines’s eighteen-year-old daughter–the cool, white calm of the sisters’ universe dissolves in a swirl of dark secrets. The family’s silences echo the unspoken atrocities of the military dictatorship holding sway in their country. But after the death of their mother forces Clarice and Maria Ines to face their shared past, an old score is settled.

In a dramatic and powerful work of great beauty and harmony, Lisboa reveals the abysses of the human soul within a framework as delicate as a butterfly’s flight.

Chef: A Novel by Jaspreet Singh
PR9199.4.S563 C47 2010

Jaspreet Singh follows his highly-acclaimed short story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir with an elegiac and hypnotic novel. Chef is a compelling lookat the India-Pakistan conflict from atop Siachen Glacier, the coldest battlefield in the world at 20,000 feet. Chef Kirpal, seriously ill, returns to Kashmir after a gap of fourteen years to cook his last meal at the Governors residence. He embarks on a long train and bus journey from Delhi to Kashmir during which he looks back over his days of apprenticeship and the life of ordinary soldiers on the Siachen Glacier, and occupation of Kashmir by India and Pakistan, prejudice against Muslims, and his relationship with women from both sides of the border. But his reasons for visiting Kashmir one last time extend further than the strong desire to cook a wedding meal for the Generals daughter. He would like to excavate a part of his past that has kept him from moving forward.

Where I Must Go: A Novel by Angela Jackson
PS3560.A179 W47 2009

Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement. The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena’s story includes a wide range of characters – black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson’s narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.

The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel by Rick Moody
PS3563.O5537 F68 2010

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won’t sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife.  Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, “The Crawling Hand.”  Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet’s first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.

Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona.  The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine.  In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally–a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives.

The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22.

Galveston: A Novel by Nic Pizzolatto
PS3616.I99 G35 2010

Recalling the moody violence of the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, a dark and visceral debut set along the seedy wastelands of Galveston by a young writer with a hard edge to his potent literary style.

On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive. Before Roy makes his getaway, he realizes there are two women in the apartment, one of them still breathing, and he sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a fateful decision. He takes her with him as he goes on the run from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas—an action as ill-advised as it is inescapable. The girl’s name is Rocky, and she is too young, too tough, too sexy—and far too much trouble. Roy, Rocky, and her sister hide in the battered seascape of Galveston’s country-western bars and fleabag hotels, a world of treacherous drifters, pickup trucks, and ashed-out hopes. Any chance that they will find safety there is soon lost. Rocky is a girl with quite a story to tell, one that will pursue and damage Roy for a very long time to come in this powerful and atmospheric thriller, impossible to put down. Constructed with maximum tension and haunting aftereffect, written in darkly beautiful prose, Galveston announces the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Translation Is a Love Affair by Jacques Poulin
Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman.
PQ3919.2.P59 T7313 2009

A quietly affecting modern fairy tale told with humor and warmth, Translation is a Love Affair is a slender novel of immense humanity. A Quebecois novelist with a bad back and his vivacious young translator, discover a stray cat with an SOS attached to its collar. They embark upon a search for its owner, and when they discover a young girl with bandaged wrists they are drawn into a mystery they don’t dare neglect. The world Poulin creates is haunted by dark memories, isolation, and tragedy, yet it is a world in which language – and love – are the most immediate and vital forces, where one human being hearing a cry of distress of another is compelled to shed one’s own inhibitions to respond.

Martyrdom Street by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
PS3611.A7853 M37 2010

Set during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the ensuing Iran-Iraq War of 1980-89, the novel Marlyrdom Street chronicles the lives of three Iranian women, Fatemah, Nasrin, and Yasaman. These ordinary women tell their intimate stories of love, loss, betrayal, and hope in interwining narratives that unfurl simultaneously in America and Iran. Kashani-Sabel’s characters endure both the familiar struggles of family relationships and searing political upheavals. A mother and daughter come to terms with the burdens of separation imposed by politics and exile: A young woman grapples with the haunting memories of an assassination. The poignant confessions of these skillfully wrought characters give voice to the travails of two generations of Iranians and Iranian Americans.

Lamb Bright Saviors by Robert Vivian
PS3572.I875 L36 2010

Robert Vivian’s prose is lyrical and harrowing, “harrowing in the Biblical sense,” Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian’s Tall Grass Trilogy. That same lyrical power carries this new volume to a place of hard-won hope and redemption at once both spiritual and earthly.

Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it’s not long before the preacher finds he’s come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life’s work: to die in front of a group of strangers. Odd as his own end-of-days might be, the lives and struggles of the strangers attending this deathbed scene are even odder. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely congregation must reckon with his or her own dark past. And, through it all, the irrepressible Mady lends the preacher’s strange performance a surprising and unforgettable dignity and humor.