Naked Pueblo
by Mark Jude Poirier, MA '92
Harmony Books, 1999; $21 (fiction).
In this debut collection of 12 unsettling stories, Poirier paints a vision of the new American West. Set among the strip malls, taco joints and trailer parks of Tucson, Ariz., his hometown, each piece chronicles the perverse, yet poignant, lives of dysfunctional young men and women. In "Something Good," employees at a thrift store plunder donations meant for charity, scoping out collector's items like a Waltons board game and a CHiPs Ponch doll (missing a boot). "La Zona Roja" focuses on the relationship of two brothers, one of whom dies after falling short while diving off a roof into a pool. In "Tilt-A-Whirl," a boy named Chigger buries his mother's amputated leg. Despite the morbid undercurrents, Poirier's characters develop troubled relationships that somehow keep them afloat -- and even have the occasional epiphany about their value as human beings.
The Angelic Darkness
by Richard Zimler, MA '82
Norton, 1999; $24 (fiction).
Bill Ticino, a compulsive philanderer whose wife has just left him, seeks companionship by advertising for a housemate. He gets more than he bargained for in Peter, a mysterious androgyne from Brazil who moves in and tries to heal -- or is it corrupt? -- his lonely landlord. The novel is a suspenseful, sexually charged tale of the occult, set in San Francisco and inspired by Zimler's master's thesis on street prostitution in the Tenderloin district. An American living in Portugal, Zimler published his first novel, the international bestseller The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, in 1998.
The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
by Clifford Siskin, '72
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; $16.95 (literary history).
Though focused on the 18th century, this study addresses a 21st-century concern: technology's impact on society. The author, a literature professor at the University of Glasgow, argues that writing was once a revolutionary technology. Among other things, it led to the classification of knowledge into disciplines, including literature, and formalized the division of labor into manual versus mental tasks. As if to allay electronic-era anxieties about the fate of literature, Siskin observes that print is merely one application for writing, just as trains are only one mode of transportation. "Clearly there are now alternatives to trains and to the traditional forms of Literature," he writes. But there are also new adaptations of old vehicles, such as monorails, bullet trains -- and e-books.
American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding
by Gary Rosen, '88
University Press of Kansas, 1999; $29.95 (political thought).
He was a rationalist who believed that republicanism was spiritually uplifting. He was devoted to government by the people but insisted that only an elite could write the Constitution. Those are just two of the seeming contradictions that made James Madison one of the more complicated American founders. But Rosen, an editor at Commentary, sees a deeper consistency. He argues that Madison was guided throughout his career by his own interpretation of the social compact -- the Enlightenment notion that human society rises above the state of nature through a shared understanding of rights and responsibilities. In his conclusion, Rosen makes a case that the philosophical principles Madison established can help solve today's disputes over diversity, states' rights and the separation of church and state.
