This Week's Acquisitions

• Chuck Palahniuk, The Sweet, Warm Smell of Fluffy Kittens in a Morning Sunbeam, and Other Tales of Cuddly, Snuggly Creatures: With an Extra Helping of Adorable Puppies (Vintage, 2011).  A series of sugary tales about cute puppehs and kittehs, intended to be read by the fire with a cup of hot chocolate nearby. 
• Ian Rankin, Celebration: An Inspector Rebus Novel (Reagan Arthur, 2011).  Typically bouncy and upbeat Rebus "cozy," tracking a series of mysterious shoe thefts on a  stereotypically warm and dry Edinburgh day.   Great for attracting tourists.
• Reginald Hill, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: A Dalziel and Pascoe Novel (HarperCollins, 2011).  Typically bouncy and upbeat Dalziel and Pascoe "cozy," in which Dalziel tries to find out who is donating gourmet chocolate to the local nursing home.  Edwin Digweed actually appears.
• Seth Grahame-Smith with Charles Dickens, Duty, Esther, Duty: Or, Esther Summerson, Vampire Killer (Grand Central, 2011).  In this clever rewrite of Bleak House, Esther Summerson makes some untoward discoveries about her background that lead her to a life of staking.  
• [Anonymous], A Year in Academia (Lulu, 2011).  A man goes undercover to find out what really happens in English departments; spends a lot of time attending department meetings, grading freshman composition papers, debating curricular reforms, and attempting to find a functional photocopier.  For some reason, the author was unable to sell this book to a traditional publisher.
• Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Canonball (Oxford, 2011).  A harsh critique of scholars who blog and write about minor novels; calls for people to study only books or authors everybody can recognize, because anything else demands too much work. 

Comments

[Sophronisba]

I would totally read Duty, Esther, Duty.

[jim]

I don't know if I would read it, but it's got to be better than Jane Austen and Zombies. Someone should write it.

[tatiana.larina]

"A Year in Academia" sounds thrilling and I really don't know why it couldn't find a publisher.