College of Humanities - The University of Arizona


Suggested by Fabian Alfie, Professor, Department of French and Italian Uniform Justice By Donna Leon Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003 Fiction This novel is part of a larger series of murder mysteries set in present-day Venice . The author, a British expatriate living in Italy , looks beyond the surface of contemporary Italian culture, and reveals many of the socio-historical tensions hidden to tourists. Filled with many sociological observations, her books are a treasure-trove of information for those wanting to understand more fully contemporary Italian life. And they're great whodunits, too!
Suggested by Alexander Dunkel, Professor, Department of Russian and Slavic Studies Absurdistan By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 2006 Fiction Publisher comments: Meet Misha Vainberg, aka "Snack Daddy," a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don't even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.

Suggested by Anne-Marie Hall, Associate Writing Specialist, Department of English Cities of Gold By William K. Hartmann Tom Doherty Associates, 2002 Fiction This book, Cities of Gold , traces Marcos de Niza's trip from Mexico City in 1539, which preceded a larger expedition by Francisco de Coronado, through Mexico and into Arizona and New Mexico . Because neither found gold (to fill the coffers of the Spanish), de Niza got branded a liar and his career was ruined. Paralleling this story is one that occurs 450 years later in Tucson – the conquest of urban sprawl. A young researcher named Kevin Scott is hired to document whether Coronado and de Niza were here. There is lots of intrigue, a murder, and fights between historical preservationists and urban planners, all related to similar kinds of greed in the 1500s. After reading this book, you might want to go exploring yourself and see some of the very spots where de Niza and Coronado visited along the rural Rio Sonora route between Hermosillo and Cananea. You can get a rural Sonora guidebook that points out all the sights along this route.

Suggested by Roseann D. Gonzalez, Professor, Department of English The Language Instinct By S. Pinker Harper-Collins Publishers, 2005 Non-Fiction The Language Instinct is a great book, which is written in a style that is accessible to linguists and laypersons alike. It discusses human language – how language works and how our humanness is defined by language. Fascinating!

Suggested by Robert Houston, Professor, Department of English A World for Julius By Alfredo Bryce Echinique University of Texas Press, 1992 Fiction Publisher comments: Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue , directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather's ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures. But Julius' father is dead and his beautiful young mother passes through her children's lives like an ephemeral shooting star. Despite the soft shelter of family and money, hard realities overshadow Julius' expanding world, just as the rugged Andes loom over his home in Lima . This lyrical, richly textured novel, first published in 1970 as Un mundo para Julius , opens new territory in Latin American literature with its focus on the social elite of Peru . In this postmodern novel, Bryce Echenique incisively charts the decline of an influential, centuries-old aristocratic family faced with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s. A World for Julius received Peru 's national literature award in 1972 and was the winner of the Outstanding Translation Award of the American Literary Translators Association and the Columbia University Translation Center Award.

Suggested by Fabio Lanza, Professor, Departments of East Asian Studies and History Fortress Besieged By Qian Zhongshu (translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao with a foreward by Jonathan Spence) New Directions, 2004 Fiction This is a new edition of one of the masterpieces of modern Chinese literature. Set in semi-occupied China during World War II, Fortress Besieged is a satirical portrait of the vacuous lives, loves, and careers of Chinese intellectuals. The title refers to a French proverb: Marriage is like a fortress besieged. Those who are outside want to get in, those who are inside want to get out.

A Brief History of the Neoliberalism By David Harvey Oxford University Press, 2005 Non-Fiction In a mini tour-de-force, Harvey retraces the history of today's economic and political order through Pinochet to Deng Xiaoping. Suddenly, things make sense…

Suggested by Chuck Tatum Dean, College of Humanities and Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese A Taco Testimony: Medidations on Family, Food and Culture By Denise Chávez Río Nuevo Publishers, 2006 Denise Chávez is the award-winning author of the novels , Face of An Angel and Loving Pedro Infante . Her autobiographical work, A Taco Testimony , is a moving and richly textured account of growing up Mexican American in Las Cruces , New Mexico . Drawing on a long Latino and Latin American tradition of women writers who integrate food into their fiction and non-fiction narrative works (the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para Chocolate/ Like Water for Chocolate is a well-known recent example), Chávez uses the taco as motif that unifies her alternating painful and joyful memories of a girlhood and adolescence in a home dominated by the strong matriarchal figure of her mother, Delfina. In a way, this work is a kind of tribute to Delfina who held her family together through trying times including the absence of her wayward husband and Denise's father. Denise remembers Delfina's tacos as incomparable, a metaphor for Delfina herself. A Taco Testimony is a marvelous example of a burgeoning body of Chicana and Chicano autobiography and memoirs.

Suggested by Ron Terpening, Professor, Department of French and Italian The Messenger By Daniel Silva Putnam, 2006 Fiction If you love intelligent thrillers you'll enjoy Daniel Silva's ninth novel, The Messenger, the sixth thriller starring Gabriel Allon, art restorer extraordinaire by cover, Israeli assassin by profession. In this beautifully crafted novel Silva focuses on Saudi-sponsored terrorism, choosing as his starting point an attack against the Vatican . If you can't wait until August, look for his New York Times bestselling Prince of Fire, just out in paperback. Both novels have scenes set in Rome , Venice , and other locales around the world.

Suggested by Rudy Troike, Professor, Department of English Walden By Henry David Thoreau Ticknor & Fields of Boston , 1854 Non-Fiction My strong recommendation is Thoreau's Walden . Newer is not always better, and this should be must reading for anyone who has not spent time with Thoreau in the woods. The contemplation of a harried consumerist existence is sharpened by the view from Walden Pond , and if anything, the perspective improves with time. Thoreau's initiation of nonviolent protest gives him a contemporary relevance. Sharing the seasons with Thoreau beside the pond provides a cool and stimulating get-away for the hot Tucson summer.

Suggested by John Ulreich, Professor, Department of English Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths By Bruce Feiler William Morrow, 2002 Non-Fiction A well-written study by a renown scholar-journalist. It is both timely as it addresses the current crisis of Jewish and Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms and timeless because it explores the many-layered history of Abraham's meaning through the ages.

Staff Picks
Suggested by Suzanne Jameson, Coordinator, Public Information and External Affairs Some Fun: Stories and a Novella By Antonya Nelson Simon & Schuster, 2006 Fiction Antonya Nelson received her MFA from the University of Arizona in 1986 and has gone on to become one of the most award-winning, critically acclaimed story writers today. Her new collection, Some Fun: Stories and a Novella , explores the complicated tensions of troubled family relations between parents and children and husbands and wives. Nelson's characters are psychologically complex and deeply flawed, yet they offer compelling insights into sorrow and renewal, love and hate.

Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women Forward by Ruth Ozeki Kodansha America, Inc., 2006 Fiction Inside and Other Short Fiction is a brand new anthology of cutting-edge fiction by contemporary Japanese women writers who are virtually unknown to Western audiences. The forward is by award-winning Japanese-American novelist Ruth Ozeki who writes, “these stories paint a picture of contemporary Japanese women's lives that is fresh, new, and possibly even shocking to readers in the West." This collection explores the issue of female identity in a rapidly changing society where women have unprecedented sexual and economic freedom. The jacket art is a section of ID400 by internationally renowned artist Tomoko Sawada, whose striking photo-booth images of herself in various guises question her own identity and the identity of all women.

Suggested by Dennis Evans, Associate Dean and Pat Brooks, Assistant Director of Development and External Affairs Suite Française By Irène Némirovsky Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2006 Fiction Irène Némirovsky's surprising bestseller was published in France two years ago to immediate critical acclaim as one of the best novels in French of the past century. (The English translation by Lucia Graves, daughter of poet Robert Graves, is also superb, entirely reflective of Némirovsky's beautiful prose.) Némirovsky was a successful writer who had published several novels in French after emigrating to Paris from Russia in 1918. She and her husband fled the invading Germans in May 1940 with their two young daughters and a nanny and remained safe for a year in a remote French village. By July 1942, though, she was betrayed as Jewish and arrested by French police. She was sent to Auschwitz , where she was killed within a month. In that single year, from 1941-42, Némirovsky wrote two novellas of a projected five novel suite (hence the title) about the events unfolding around her in France . "Storm in June" follows the chaotic, terrifying, and bizzarely comic flight from Paris of a cast of characters that merits comparison to the best of Tolstoy. “Dolce”, the second novela, focuses on life in a small village during the first year of the German occupation. Némirovsky composed her works in a tiny hand in a single notebook almost contemporaneously with the events they describe. The notebook survived because it was the only memento of their lost mother that the two daughters could carry with them during their own desperate odyssey to avoid capture and death. Amazingly, it was not until the late 1990s that the eldest daughter finally opened the talismanic notebook and realized it was not a diary at all that her mother had risen early each morning to write in, but two fully formed works of fiction. The book itself is equally miraculous -- surprising, delighting, and inspiring at every turn. If you're like us, you will be torn between wanting to keep reading relentlessly to learn what happens and wanting to pause often to savor the turns of phrase and many small pleasures that illumine each page.

Staff Picks