It’s that time again… yes, it’s the end of summer (how did that happen so fast?) but also time to highlight some of the newest, shiniest books that have arrived here at the EFL this past month. Read on to find out more, or visit https://www.librarything.com/catalog/EFLOxford/efl to see the complete list of our latest acquisitions.
John Goodby & Adrian Osbourne (eds.). 2021. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas.
Dylan Thomas scholars will find this book of great interest – a facsimile of the fifth of Thomas’ surviving notebooks; school exercise books into which he fair-copied his poems between May 1930 and August 1935. While the other four notebooks were sold in 1941, this fifth notebook only came to light in 2014. It spans a time period of May 1934 until August 1935 and contains sixteen of Thomas’ poems, and is the only manuscript source for several of them. It therefore provides unprecedented insight into Thomas’ poetic process.
Rosemary Alice Gray. 2021. The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri.
Grey’s study of Ben Okri’s work is the first comprehensive analysis of the Booker Prize-winning novelist’s themes and inspiration. Additionally, this book contains a complete bibliography of Okri’s creative works, as well as an in-depth interview with the writer himself. Gray creates her own reading of Okri’s texts, focusing on the metaphysical, cultural and spiritual, and aims ‘to show that Okri transmits to close gaps, to create bonds’ (p.xi). Her reading highlights Okri’s concern for the planet ‘both in terms of ecology and human community’ (p.xii).
Vivian Y. Kao. 2020. Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel.
Kao examines how film adaptations of nineteenth-century British novels explore and expose the continued contribution of imperial ideologies of progress towards power imbalances that still exist today. Demonstrating the negative consequences of a narrowly defined, Western capitalist idea of ‘improvement’, Kao argues: ‘Whereas the adaptations I examine recognize the harmful legacies of improvement ideology—its assumptions about time, space, self, and modernity—they also recognize the potential of nineteenth-century fiction to provide adaptable ideas, narratives, characters, and forms with which to critique the negative aspects of that colonial heritage’ (p.38).
Niyi Osundare. 2017. If Only the Road Could Talk: Poetic Peregrinations in Africa, Asia, and Europe.
In his preface to this poetry collection, Osundare writes, ‘Places make people. People make places’ (p.xiii). If Only the Road Could Talk reflects on Osundare’s travels through Africa, Asia and Europe, exploring cities as far-flung from each other as Cairo, Johannesburg, Jeonju and Amsterdam. In Osundare’s poetry, the road itself is an ‘inscrutable protagonist in the endless drama of farewells and welcomes. The one who knows so much but says so little’ (p.xv).
Examining fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first century, this book scrutinises the novels of over forty writers and explores how these postmodernist texts tackle critical current global issues. Examples include: how Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides address gender issues; how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist approaches the concept of terrorism; how Bharati Mukherjee critiques capitalist globalisation in The Holder of the World; and how Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy confronts the surveillance state and the climate crisis.