Hilary Term is in full swing and the English Faculty Library is glad to have our readers back and our books flying off the shelves once again. That’s not to mention our new books flying on to the shelves. To kick-start your week, we’ve compiled a little list of some of the most intriguing titles from this month’s additions. As always, you can see our full catalogue over on LibraryThing.
Elif Shafak. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. 2020.
This was our first book to hit the shelves in 2022! Elif Shafak’s book is an intimate and compassionate novel that looks in unflinching detail at the life and hardships of a woman named Leila from Istanbul, beginning with her death, weaving back through her life, and flourishing out to explore the experiences of her five closest friends. Shafak’s wordcraft is poetic and delightful, and the portrait she paints is both intensely political and unavoidably human. This was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, and was published in paperback in 2020.
Purchased through the Drue Heinz Fund.
Leo Boix. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant. 2021.
Supplied to the English Faculty Library through our Poetry Book Society subscription, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant is a evocative collection of poetry. Bilingual Latinx poet Leo Boix explores his paternal grandfather’s arrival in England as well as his own experiences of the same kind as a queer man. Using both Spanish and English language, his work is formally and linguistically innovative, delightful to read, and explores the internal struggle of themes such as “otherness and home” and “personal transformation” (blurb).
Purchased through the Drue Heinz Fund.
Monique Roffey. The Mermaid of Black Conch. 2020.
This novel was recognised not only as the Costa Book of the Year 2020, but was also picked as one of our Alumni Recommended titles as part of the Telling Our Stories Better Project – you can read more about this project on the Faculty of English website. It’s a story imbued with magic and romance, in which a woman is cursed to live as a mermaid by jealous wives, only to fall in love with a singing fisherman called David and be caught up in a fishing contest as a prize catch. The interweaving of love, transformation and jealousy makes for a rich and evocative modern tale that swims around themes of ecology, history, and migration.
Harry Josephine Giles. Deep Wheel Orcadia. 2021.
In Deep Wheel Orcadia, theatre performer and poet Harry Josephine Giles has blended science fiction and poetry into a flowing verse novel about a space station under cultural threat from rapid change. The book is written in Orkney dialect (Josie having hailed from Orkney herself) and is translated into English, presenting the two texts in parallel on every page. Their background as a theatre performer is evident in both the structure of the book (right down to a page listing ‘the people’) and the immediacy of the poetry (even from the opening line: “The chime o the tannoy is whit taks her back” (p.3)
Brent Hayes Edwards. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. 2017.
Epistrophies is named after the composition by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke (Epistrophy) and the poem by Amiri Karaka (Epistrophe), as well as the repetitive literary device. This is fitting, because the book looks at the intimate intersections of poetry, music, and wider art – how closely music sits to language, and how this inspiration breeds innovation and creativity for both forms and across black art. This, Edwards argues, creates “a unique – and uniquely African American – sphere of art-making and performance.” (blurb).