New fiction at the UGA Libraries, Feb 8
February 8, 2011 – 4:02 PMedited by Todd James Pierce and Jarret Keene
Las Vegas is considered a modern icon of excess. It offers every imaginable extreme of greed, pleasure, and despair, all supported by technology thatenhances fantasy and allows residents and visitors alike to forget reality and responsibility. The authors of the fourteen stories in Dead Neon imagine Sin City in the near future, when excess has led to social,
environmental, or economic collapse. Their stories range from futuristic casinos to the seared post-apocalyptic desert, from the struggle to survive in a repressive theocracy to the madness of living in a world where most life forms and all moral codes have vanished.
Dead Neon explores the possible future of America by examining the near future of Las Vegas. The authors, all either Vegas-based or intimately familiar with the city, capture its unique rhythms and flavor and probe its potential for evoking the fullest range of the human spirit in settings of magic, horror, and despair.
Purge by Sofi Oksanen
translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers.
PH356.O37 P8413 2010
An international sensation, Sofi Oksanen’s award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them.
When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.
Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.
PS3607.R463 W43 2010
Ben Greenman is a writer of virtuosic range and uncanny emotional insight. As Darin Strauss has noted, “Like Bruno Schulz, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and no one else I can think of, Greenman hasthe power to be whimsical without resorting to whimsy.” The stories in this new collection, What He’s Poised to Do, showcase his wide range, yet are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word.
From a portrait of an unfaithful man contemplating his own free will to the saga of a young Cuban man’s quixotic devotion to a woman he may never have met; and from a nineteenth-century weapons inventor’s letter to his young daughter to an aging man’s wistful memory of a summer love affair in a law office; each of these stories demonstrates Greenman’s maturity as a chronicler of romantic angst both contemporary and timeless, and as an explorer of the ways our yearning for connection informs our selves and our souls.
Revenge: A fable by Taslima Nasrin
translated [from the Bengali] by Honor Moore with Taslima Nasrin.
PK1730.3.A65 S6313 2010
Revenge is a delicious novel about getting even from one of the
most controversial and internationally acclaimed writers of her generation.
In modern Bangladesh, Jhumur marries for love and imagines life with her husband, Haroon, will continue much as it did when they were dating on her university campus. But once she crosses the threshold of Haroon’s family home, Jhumur finds she is expected to be the traditional Muslim wife: head covered, eyes averted, and unable to leave the house without an escort. When she becomes pregnant, Jhumur is shocked to discover that Haroon doesn’t believe the baby is his. Overwhelmed by his mistrust, Jhumur plots her revenge in the arms of a handsome neighbor. Readers from every walk of life will be stunned by this tale of love, lust, and blood ties.
The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui
translated by Adam Kabat.
PL862.S77 K3913 2010
Nanase cannot remember when she first realized she could read people’s minds, but not once during her eighteen years has she ever questioned her particularly unusual ability. Yet, working as a live-in maid, she is inevitably drawn into the lives, thoughts and desires of her employers, with dangerous and at times hilarious consequences. From the sexual rapaciousness of her first boss to the grime and stench of the house where she works next and her third employer’s inability to accept she’s no longer young, Nanase’s adventures are a picaresque journey into the inner sanctum of the lives and psyches of ordinary Japanese people.
The Golden Age: A novel by Michal Ajvaz
translated [from Czech] by Andrew Oakland.
PG5039.1.J83 Z39 2010
The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island
in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.
The Three Fates by Linda Lê
translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti.
PQ2672.E1113 T7613 2010
An intensely lively and piquant novel about a Vietnamese family, The Three Fates concerns rivalries and jealousies, strange motives and destructive passions. The three fates—now three Vietnamese “princesses” in France—were spirited away as little children by their powerful grandmother when Saigon fell to the communists. Now the two sisters and their cousin await the arrival of their father and uncle, still marooned in his little blue house in the old country. “Leave King Lear alone, I’d told my cousins,” our principal narrator (an intellectual who has lost a hand) informs us: “They had neglected him for twenty years and now they were conspiring like a pair of Cordelias to bestow one last joy on the old monarch: he hadn’t asked for it.” From a luxurious home in the French countryside, his two daughters (the elder, very pregnant and restlessly cooking and eating, kept company by her long-legged and icy younger sister) plot to drag their father halfway around the world – away from his poverty and from his only friend and the grilled eels they happily devour together – to flaunt their success. Scathingly unsentimental, The Three Fates transposes Shakespearean tragedy into a contemporary idiom and a decidedly different culture. A sharply vivacious book about “the bitch of fate,” The Three Fates—like a witches’ pot on the boil—brews up from displaced lives a darkly funny and agitated concatenation.
