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On Bullfighting

Julia M
In a departure from novels and short stories, Scottish writer and comedian A.L. Kennedy delivers an account of the tradition and reality of bullfighting. Slimmer than Hemingway’s dogged, immersive work of sweat, his Death in the Afternoon, but no lighter for that, On Bullfighting lifts the masculine nostalgia from Hemingway’s (excellent) precedent. Kennedy admits her interest in bullfighting arose in order to write the book, not the other way around. An outsider’s witness statement, its perspective is idiosyncratic, at times unnervingly personal, always frank. Kennedy lingers on the centrality of pain, independent of the courage which would sublimate it. This marks her most noticeable divergence from Hemingway. She inquires, searchingly, into the experience of the bull without presuming to know his experience. She exposes the conditions of modern bullfighting without politicizing. Hospitable to the anti-, the pro-, and the agnostic, On Bullfighting is a stringent and sensitive extended essay. It seeks and finds focused illumination, rather than mastery, of its subject.

Kennedy, A.L. On Bullfighting. Anchor, 2001, paper, octavo, 176 pp. Our in-store sale price: $4.95.

Julia M can be found in the stacks at Hyde Park, and if she has to choose favorites, she is particularly fond of the classics, poetry, philosophy and nature sections.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

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Child of God

James

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God hurls the reader into the depths of the fractured horizon of one Lester Ballard, an outsider and outcast who spends his days lurking and prowling along the borders of polite society in a small town in East Tennessee. Lester, having been driven off his land by the self-righteous local sheriff, bitterly trudges through life as a dirt-poor drifter and grifter. After suffering further spiteful and petty indignities at the hands of some of the town’s more respectable citizens, Lester embarks upon a rapidly escalating crime spree that begins with lecherous voyeurism and terminates somewhere far more disturbing. Along the way, we are offered no real explanations for Lester’s behavior, and neither the narrator nor Lester himself attempts to justify his cretinous behavior, rendering his actions all the more inscrutable and disturbing. McCarthy’s prose is characteristically muscular and evocative, and Lester’s frightening character is somewhat softened by flashes of black humor, as well as unexpectedly imbued with poetry by moments of romantic affinity with his natural surroundings. Perhaps the most thought provoking element of the book is the title’s inescapable and unsettling reminder that in spite of his deviant criminality, and no matter how much moral and olfactory distance we would like to place between Lester and us, the ethical and upright members of society, he remains, like you and I, a child of God.

McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. Picador, 2011, paper, octavo, 186 pp. Our in-store sale price: $4.95.

James can be found at Powell’s Hyde Park, University Village and the warehouse with his nose buried deep in Nietzsche.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!

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The Half Brother

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Selected by Mandy M.

This haunting Scandinavian Bildungsroman by Lars Saabye Christensen echoes the Nordic epics of old with a surprisingly modern wit and sadness. The Half Brother tells the winding story of a post-war family in Oslo though the eyes of Barnum, a smart but short boy named after the con artist P.T. Barnum who lives with his circus artist stepfather, conspicuously quiet mother, grandmother dubbed “The Old One” and troubled older half-brother Fred . Barnum’s relationship with his rebellious and angry older brother takes center stage for much of the novel as Barnum learns to deal with the complex emotions incited by a family who abandons him and envelops him at random. Christensen combines a Murakami-like dreaminess with the gentle weight of Hamsun to deliver a gratifyingly melancholy novel of love, loss and a young man’s journey to become a writer.

Christensen, Lars Saaybe. The Half Brother. Arcade, 2004, paper, octavo, 682 pp. List price: $15.95. Our in-store sale price: $6

Mandy works at Powell’s University Village and Powell’s Lakeview where she can often be found rummaging through the poetry section.

Staff Review of the Week highlights some of our favorite picks from the stacks. Come to any one of our three retail locations and talk to our interesting and knowledgeable staff about books!