Recent Acquisitions: Literature

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned.

Mystery Fiction. India 1922. When a tiger turns man-eater and starts terrorizing the villages of Ranipur, Joe Sandilands is dispatched to join in a hunt for the beast as a guest of the Maharaja. The maharajah is dying and the first heir to the throne has been killed by a panther and a second violent death occurs as Joe approaches the city. Joe suspects another killer is prowling the corridors of the palace and must track him down through a maze of intrigue.

The story of a South Vietnamese captain -- a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America -- who returns to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son.

This novel follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . . . ” This is how Abby Whitshank always describes the day she fell in love with Red in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate an indefinable kind of specialness, but like all families, their stories reveal only part of the picture: Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s parents, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to the grandchildren carrying the Whitshank legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn house that has always been their anchor."

In this book Zora Neale Hurston records the voices of ordinary people and pays tribute to the richness of Black vernacular--its crisp self-awareness, singular wit, and improvisational wordplay. These folk-tales reflect the joys and sorrows of the African-American experience, celebrate the redemptive power of storytelling, and showcase the continuous presence in America of the Africanized language that flourishes to this day.

The author offers a revealing and poignant memoir of growing up in Ireland with a violent father and selfless mother as the eldest of seven children, the early death of his mother and the strong influence of his mother's love on his life, his career as a writer, and the impact of the landscape of his youth on both his life and work.

Lyrical. Crossways (1889) -- The rose (1893) -- The wind among the reeds (1899) -- In the seven woods (1904) -- The green helmet and other poems (1910) -- Responsibilities (1914) -- The wild swans of Coole (1919) Michael Robartes and the dancer (1921) -- The tower (1928) -- The winding stair and other poems (1933) -- [Parnell's funeral and other poems (1935)] -- New poems (1938) -- [Last poems (1938-1939)] -- Narrative and dramatic.

Kathleen de Burca's research on the 1850s affair between an English landlord's wife and an Irish servant causes her to reconsider her own life.

Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift's life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes some speculations about Swift's parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift's public version of his life--the one accepted until recently--was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets. Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters.