A MISCELLANY OF BOOKS
Newly Released Books
NY TIMES || JUNE 2010
Add a few more volumes to the bookshelf that holds the expanding literature of the Great Recession. This month’s protagonists watch as jobs, homes, boyfriends and opportunities disappear — and those are in the comic novels. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck delivers a conspiracy thriller with a P.R. executive as its villain. >>READ MORE
A masterpiece in Telugu literature
BY PAPPU VENUGOPALA RAO || THE HINDU || JUNE 2010
AMUKTAMALYADA
by Sri Krishna Devaraya
Tr. into English by Srinivas Sistla
Pub. by Drusya Kala Deepika
The reign of Sri Krishna Devaraya, the most famous of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire, is hailed as a golden era by historians. Inscriptions speak of him as a monarch in the fields of war and literature ( sahitee samarangana sarvabhauma).
Not only did he have eight court poets ( ashta diggajas), he himself was a great poet, although doubts persist in certain quarters of the literary world about the authorship of the works attributed to him. However, internal evidences are cited to establish his authorship in the case of ‘Amuktamalyada.’ >>READ MORE
Julie Orringer’s World War II saga, “The Invisible Bridge”
BY DONNA RIFKIND || WASHINGTON POST || JUNE 2010
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE
By Julie Orringer
Knopf; 602 pp. $26.95
The cover of Julie Orringer’s first novel shows a photograph of the Chain Bridge, one of Budapest’s most-loved landmarks. The picture was taken as World War II was drawing to a close, just after retreating German troops had bombed the Hungarian capital’s bridges to delay the advancing Soviet offensive. In Orringer’s cover photo, the Chain Bridge is a shattered remnant: Only emptiness is suspended between the pillars flanking the Danube. What we see, in that stunned moment, is an invisible bridge.
Long before the bombing of Budapest occurs at the end of this novel, Orringer uses the symbolism of invisible bridges in many inventive ways, re-engineering traditional dimensions of time and space, calibrating the immensity of world-war deaths against the specifics of one family’s life, and building emotional connections between parents and children, husbands and wives, the preserved and the obliterated. And gradually, over time, she shows how supple those connections are and how instantly they can be broken. >>READ MORE
‘Victory’ essays take an honest look at the 1950s
BY DON NOBLE || TUSCALOOSANEWS.COM || JUNE 2010
Philip Beidler had built up a considerable reputation as a critic in the fields of Alabama literature and the literature of the Vietnam experience before he began writing extensively out of his own Vietnam experience in “Late Thoughts on an Old War” (2004) and “American Wars, American Peace” (2007).
Now, in a third volume of 16 essays, plus an introduction and conclusion, written at such speed that he didn’t even bother to have them published individually in periodicals, Beidler has produced a combination of memoir and cultural history of his childhood years, which are also mine.
“The Victory Album” is about that period we call the ’50s. This starts with the end of World War II and ends with 1960, or the assassination of President Kennedy or of Martin Luther King Jr., though some believe that America’s era of cultural and military dominance has never ended. >>READ MORE
‘The Possessed’: Open to anything, as long as it’s Russian
BY VALERIE RYAN || THE SEATTLE TIMES || JUNE 2010
‘The Possessed’
by Elif Batuman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 296 pp., $15
The subtitle of Batuman’s book: “Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” doesn’t begin to tell the tale of this quirky, funny, erudite hybrid of intellectual razzle-dazzle, graduate-school angst, youthful high spirits and a serious examination of aspects of Russians and their literature, never before undertaken in quite the same way. Batuman is the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and an instructor at Stanford University. Her essays, even some of these, have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1 and Harper’s.
The book is comprised of seven essays: a group of three titled “Summer in Samarkand,” one on Isaac Babel, one on Tolstoy, one on the House of Ice in St. Petersburg, a palace commissioned by Empress Anna Ivanovna, and finally, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed.” >>READ MORE
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