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Listed below are the novels that we will explore in the class.
To help you choose, please investigate the text more in depth by visiting
amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com.
Fools Crow
(Contemporary American Fiction)
by James Welch
The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the
chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young
warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made:
resistance or humiliating accommodation. "A major contribution to Native American
literature."--Wallace Stegner
My Year of Meats
by
Ruth L.Ozeki
At first glance, a novel that promises to expose the unethical
practices of the American meat industry may not be at the top of your
reading list, but Ruth Ozeki's debut,
My Year of Meats is well worth a second look. Like the author, the
novel's protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American
documentary filmmaker; like Ozeki, who was once commissioned by a beef
lobbying group to make television shows for the Japanese market, Jane is
invited to work on a Japanese television show meant to encourage beef
consumption via the not-so-subliminal suggestion that prime rib equals a
perfect family:
TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: Tokyo Office
DATE: January 5, 1991
RE: My American Wife!...
Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!
DESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class
meats, so please remember this easy motto: "Pork is Possible, but Beef
is Best!")
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house...
UNDESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples
The series, My American Wife!, initally seems like a dream come
true for Jane as she criss-crosses the United States filming a different
American family each week for her Japanese audience. Naturally, the
emphasis is on meat, and Ozeki has fun with out-there recipes such as rump
roast in coke and beef fudge; but as Jane becomes more familiar with her
subject, she becomes increasingly aware of the beef industry's widespread
practice of using synthetic estrogens on their cattle and determines to
sabotage the program.
Cut to Tokyo where Akiko Ueno struggles through the dull misery of life
with her brutish husband, who happens to be in charge of the show's
advertising. After seeing one of Jane's subversive episodes about a
vegetarian lesbian couple, Akiko gets in touch and the two women plot to
expose the meat industry's hazardous practices. Romance, humor, intrigue,
and even a message--My Year of Meats has it all. This is a book
that even a vegetarian would love. --This text refers to an out of
print or unavailable edition of this title.
Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned
Walter Mosely
New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an
"astonishing character" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) in this acclaimed
collection of entwined tales. Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking
truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles -- and finding the miracle of
survival.
"I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in
jail. Once you go to prison you belong there." Socrates Fortlow has done his
time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge,
rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered
rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and
moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to
a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and
fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own
battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.
Interpereter
of Maladies
Jumpha Lahiri
Amazon.com
Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title
story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to
interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut
collection. Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A
Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn
child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a
married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to
his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak
his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest.
His fare on this particular day is Mr. and Mrs. Das--first-generation
Americans of Indian descent--and their children. During the course of the
afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamored of Mrs. Das and then becomes her
unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you
because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling
secret.
I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. Eight years, Mr. Kapasi,
I've been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better;
say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.
Of course, Mr. Kapasi has no cure for what ails Mrs. Das--or himself.
Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a
whole. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United
States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations
Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend
ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final
Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have
traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in
which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal
experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in
or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner,
even within one's own family. --Alix Wilber
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Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
This reissue of Erdrich's exquisite
first novel includes five new sections that color and complement the original
multigenerational saga of two extended families who live on and around a
Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. Each chapter is narrated in a memorable
voice like the one of Lipsha Morrissey, a young man who is believed to have "the
touch," with which he attempts to bring his wandering grandfather back to his
long-suffering grandmother with a love medicine made from goose hearts. By
placing us right inside the heads of her remarkable characters, Erdrich allows
us to feel the despair that insensitive government policies, poverty, and
alcoholism have brought them. For those who have yet to discover this magical
novel and for those who will have the pleasure of reexperiencing its heartbreak
and its hope, this new version is highly recommended.
Sula
Toni Morrison
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n Sula, Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel
Prize for literature, tells the story of two women--friends since childhood,
separated in young adulthood, and reunited as grown women. Nel Wright grows
up to become a wife and mother, happy to remain in her hometown of
Medallion, Ohio. Sula Peace leaves Medallion to experience college, men, and
life in the big city, an exceptional choice for a black woman to make in the
late 1920s.
As girls, Nel and Sula are the best of friends, only children who find in
each other a kindred spirit to share in each girl's loneliness and
imagination. When they meet again as adults, it's clear that Nel has chosen
a life of acceptance and accommodation, while Sula must fight to defend her
seemingly unconventional choices and beliefs. But regardless of the physical
and emotional distance that threatens this extraordinary friendship, the
bond between the women remains unbreakable: "Her old friend had come
home.... Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present
was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a
conversation with herself."
Lyrical and gripping, Sula is an honest look at the power of
friendship amid a backdrop of family, love, race, and the human condition.
--Gisele Toueg |
Carver loves his characters yet he's never sentimental, January 17,
2002
Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver has been compared, rightly, to Chekhov because of his ability
to absorb the reader in a "small" story and say something profound about the
human condition. Absent in Carver's stories are stereotypical characters. For
example, in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," we read a story about
a heart surgeon, Mel McGuiness, who is obsessed with preaching the virutes of
absolute love to his wife and two friends, another couple. As we read the story,
we see evidence that Mel is the embodiment of the absence of love. He is
imperious, bullying, dogmatic, control-obsessed, fearful of life. Yet Carver
doesn't allow us to dismiss Mel so easily. As Mel pontificates on love and gets
more and more drunk, we are afforded glimpses of Mel's profound wisdom, which
shows that there are two Mels, a tyrant and a vulnerable searcher of truth, that
are warring against each other. Mel, the searcher of truth, knows there is a
more profound, permanent love than merely carnal or erotic passion. At one point
in the story, he confesses, in a moment of drunkenness, that he is completely
ignorant of life. We sympathize with Mel's passion for "ultimate love," yet we
are at the same time appalled at Mel's bullying and vanity.
Mel's character is indicative of the kind of complexities and contradictions
that Carver dramatizes in his very readable stories.
***Each of the above summaries was taken from amazon.com reviews.
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