by Junot Díaz, MFA ’95 (Riverhead Books)
In Brief
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO
by Junot Díaz, MFA '95 (Riverhead Books). Junot Díaz's first novel, published eleven years after his debut short story collection, Drown, leaps between street slang and literary language. It tells the story of Oscar, a fat, lovelorn science fiction geek and would-be writer, his beautiful sister, Lola, and their emotionally volatile mother, Belicia Cabral, against the backdrop of Paterson, New Jersey, and the Dominican Republic. The Cabral family was ruined by the Trujillo dictatorship and lives under a curse. Oscar's search for love takes him to Santo Domingo, but even love cannot release him from his family's past.
THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE by Diane Ackerman, MFA '73, PhD '79 (W. W. Norton). When the Germans attacked Warsaw during the invasion of Poland in 1939, zookeepers Antonina and Jan Zabinski saw many of their animals killed in the bombardment and the survivors transported to zoos in Germany. Horrified by Nazi racism, the Zabinskis turned the zoo into a refuge, extracting some Jews from the ghetto, and hiding others in animal enclosures. Jan cached explosives for the Resistance right under the nose of the Gestapo; Antonina cared for animals and secreted her "guests" in their villa. At great risk to themselves, they saved the lives of more than 300 Jews.
LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER by Stewart O'Nan, MFA '92 (Viking). Stewart O'Nan's latest follows Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster in New Britain, Connecticut, and his crew as they work during a snowstorm on the restaurant's last day. This short novel finds the extraordinary in the ordinary rituals of restaurant work. More than a simple slice of life, it becomes a story about the conflict between love and desire, and the strange moral force that comes from doing a job well even when (especially when) no one seems to care.
HAUNTED BY WATERS by Robert T. Hayashi, MFA '89 (University of Iowa Press). Meditating upon the region's Japanese American history as he undertakes a fly-fishing trip in Idaho, an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Hayashi —whose grandfather died in the Mini-doka internment camp—unravels the complex reality of people and environment in the West. Hayashi argues that considering race is essential for a full understanding of American places. "Being naturalized as an other in America has always meant moving in its spaces conscious of borders, of places where you cannot or should not venture."
SOURCEBOOK OF SCANDINAVIAN FURNITURE by Judith Gura '56 (W. W. Norton). Combining strong national crafts traditions and modernist aesthetic, the five Nordic countries have had a dominant influence on contemporary furniture design. "The unique determinants of their extraordinary success," writes Gura, a professor and director of the design history program at the New York School of Interior Design, "were the character of the people and a cultural climate that nurtured their particular attitude toward design—one in which the integrity of each object was more important than the pursuit of fashion."
Recently Published
SILENCE by Thomas Perry '69 (Harcourt). Private investigator Jack Till taught Wendy Harper how to create a new identity and disappear. Years later he must find her again to prove that her former business partner is innocent of Wendy's murder. Edgar Award-winning novelist Perry introduces Paul and Sylvie Turner, a comically sinister husband and wife team of hired killers who possess the "unhurried grace of wading birds."
STÈLES by Victor Segalen; translated, edited, and annotated by Timothy Billings, PhD '97, and Christopher Bush (Wesleyan University Press). Victor Segalen's poetic imitation of the inscriptions on Chinese stone tablets was an important influence on early twentieth-century French modernism. Billings, an associate professor at Middlebury, and Bush, a former fellow at Princeton, provide the first English critical edition of the work.
SHALL THE MURDERER GO UNPUNISHED! by Stephen D. Butz '94, MAT '96 (North Country Books). One of the largest brains in Cornell's Wilder Brain Collection belongs to Edward Rulloff. Today he lends his name to a College-town restaurant, but the polymath, inventor, and theoretician on the origin of language led a double life as the leader of a gang of thieves and a murderer who began his criminal career in mid-nineteenth-century Ithaca.
GO, AND DO THOU LIKEWISE by Shirley H. Fondiller (Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing Alumni Association). Dr. Fondiller explores the history of the School of Nursing from 1877 to 1979, and examines the changing role of the nursing profession.
GREEN LIGHTS aka The Ithaca Movie, directed by Cornell physics lecturer Robert Lieberman and Slavomir Grunberg, is now available on DVD. Much of the film was shot in Ithaca, and many Ithacans—including Cornell faculty and staff—appear as themselves or extras. Variety praised the movie's "small town-meets-Hollywood vibe," calling it "one of those great, absurd movies-within-movies." Lieberman's 2005 documentary Last Stop Kew Gardens, about his boyhood neighborhood in Queens, is also available on DVD. Both movies can be purchased at www.kewgardensmovie.com.