2010 Summer Newsletter - Around the World

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Literature from Around the World

The Vagrants (Paperback)

By Yiyun Li
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780812973341
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2/2010
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Small-town life has the reputation of being constrained by neighbors who know everyone else's business. This truth is taken to an extreme in the impoverished provincial Chinese town of Muddy River, the setting of Liyun Li's powerful first novel, THE VAGRANTS (Random House, $15). It's 1979, a decade after the Cultural Revolution and another ten years before the Tiananmen Square uprising. Democracy Walls are springing up in Beijing, but no one knows how far they will go. When a young woman is executed as a counterrevolutionary after her boyfriend reports the once-fervent believer's doubts about the Party, her village is split between those who want to protest and those who fear the authorities. In Li's vivid portrait of a repressed society, even schoolchildren can become informers, and personal acts bear political consequences. Laurie Greer 

The Angel's Game (Paperback)

By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9780767931113
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Anchor, 5/2010
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In the gorgeously imagined The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón followed an eccentric group of readers and booksellers into spooky corners of postwar Barcelona. Ruiz Zafón returns to his beloved city in THE ANGEL'S GAME (Anchor, $15.95)—but this time, he's interested not in those who sell books, but those who produce them. After a mysterious publisher offers the young prodigy David Martin an astoundingly lucrative commission, the writer finds himself consumed by the manuscript. Martin—convinced that he's bartered his soul in exchange for his talent—soon suspects that his client is the Devil himself. Ruiz Zafón plumbs questions of writing, craftsmanship, and obsession in this darkly beguiling tale that has all the intrigue and beauty of its predecessor. - Elizabeth Sher

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Paperback)

By Geoff Dyer
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307390301
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 4/2010
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JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI (Vintage, $15), by Geoff Dyer, is a book that stayed with me long after I finished it. In the first of the novel's two parts, Jeff, a mediocre freelance journalist, is hired to cover the Venice Biennale.  Everything about this event is over the top:  the parties, the art, the drinking, the sex--even the weather is overheated. For part two Dyer moves the action to Varanasi. An unnamed journalist on assignment gradually feels the slow, spiritual workings of the holy city transform him.  He ends up staying longer than he'd planned.  Is this the same pseudo-slacker Jeff from part one, or is this someone else entirely?  Give yourself over to Dyer’s (and Jeff’s) sensuous journey to find the answer. - Susan Skirboll

Between the Assassinations (Paperback)

By Aravind Adiga
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9781439153161
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Free Press, 6/2010
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Welcome to Kittur. Aravind Adiga’s tour of this South-Western Indian city of 193,432 takes place BETWEEN THE ASSASSINATIONS (Free Press, $15) of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Interspersed with maps, history, and sight-seeing highlights, these 14 linked stories from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger focus on Kittur’s diverse and contentious religions, ethnicities, and castes. Of whatever faith or social level, however, the majority of Adiga’s characters are poor. Poor, angry, and defiant. They may sleep in the streets, beg for money for a father’s drugs, abase themselves before bosses and rich patrons, but these people never lose their essential dignity. Adiga’s searing stories of hard work, betrayal, love, and corruption capture “that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy that is the nature of every Indian village.”  - Laurie Greer

Secret Son (Paperback)

By Laila Lalami
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9781565129795
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 3/2010
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If Great Expectations had taken place in Morocco, it might have read like Laila Lalami's SECRET SON (Algonquin, $13.95).  Eighteen-year-old Youssef El Mekki has lived his whole life in a shack outside Casablanca. When he learns that he might inherit a fortune, he sheds his degrading poverty (along with his mother and friends) for a luxurious lifestyle in the city. Meanwhile, an Islamist group known only as "The Party" insidiously extends its influence in Youssef's slum. Lalami uses Youssef's rags-to-riches ascent to expose the twin poles of Moroccan society: from the unemployed young men who are easy prey for the fundamentalists, to the moneyed elite who educate their children in Europe and the United States. - Elizabeth Sher