Aaron received his BA at the University of Wisconsin in 2001 and was the sole proprietor of his own bookshop for five years. He received his MA from the University of Utah in British and American Literature, and comes to TKE with not only an education in and a love of books, but plenty of experience. On May 11th, 2009, his wife Katherine brought the newest member of their family into the world, a little girl named Viola Wren.
Aaron enjoys cooking (and we enjoy the results!), watching old films, and reading whenever he has the chance.
ISBN-13: 9780802119285 Availability: Not In Stock - Available to Order Published: Atlantic Monthly Press, 04/01/2010
Like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Karl Marlantes’ sprawling, gritty Vietnam War epic vividly explores the experience of being in the line of fire in a time of war. With a keen eye for detail that comes from his own experiences in Vietnam, and a delicate sensitivity to the subtlest nuances of the human condition, he illustrates the transformation of Second Lieutenant Mellas from a naïve Princeton graduate to the indurate officer who stalks the bloodied foliage of Southeast Asia, and meditates on questions of race, heroism, and integrity. Matterhorn is destined to be a classic of the genre!
ISBN-13: 9781400069262 Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Spiegel & Grau, 04/01/2010
In 2002, American readers were amazed by Yann Martel’s extraordinarily original and inspiring novel, Life of Pi, a work that resonated most strongly with readers who allowed for a collapse of function and form that was nothing short of a literary coup d’état. In Beatrice and Virgil, his most highly distilled work to date, Martel takes his readers on a heart wrenching re-visitation of the darkest chapter of human history, and surveys the terrifying landscape of the human condition he finds there, running the reader through with a palpable pathos that will linger interminably.
ISBN-13: 9781935439134 Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability Published: Ig Publishing, 04/01/2010
Left spiritually and physically scarred by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem, Sarah retreats to the wilderness to rediscover faith. With a bottle of twelve year old scotch tied to the bow like a mascot, the silent, beautiful landscape rolls slowly by, and she forges onward in her kayak, through a new world that has become cold and hostile. Every dip of her paddle in the icy waters of the Alaskan coastline, every painful step she takes on frozen, blackened feet, brings her, and us, a little bit closer to the truth that she seeks: how can we find meaning in a world that can lash out at us with no warning, and with such violence?
ISBN-13: 9780803222960 Availability: On Our Shelves Now Published: University of Nebraska Press, 03/01/2010
In an era that celebrates books that explore the history of everything, Patrick Madden’s Quotidiana delightfully reminds us that our history, individual or collective, can be made significant by anything. Exploring life’s subtlest nuances and details, as well as our own peculiarities and fixations, Madden considers how these seemingly insignificant influences and experiences dialogue with one another in ways that give everyday life meaning. Madden’s erudite voyage around physics and architecture, though history, near rock and roll, and from the complexities of science back to the simplicity of an old family photograph or the bubble of his daughter’s laughter is delightful.
ISBN-13: 9781439172179 Availability: On Our Shelves Now Published: Free Press, 02/01/2010
This startling and brilliant literary debut deftly fashions a portrait of a group of impoverished African émigrés in modern day London. Like a younger Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Peter Akinti writes with a restrained rage, and with an equally keen eye for meaningful detail, evoking the isolation and disconnection felt by society’s outsiders. Even more rare is this brave new writer’s razor-edged exploration of intra-ethnic prejudice, as his main character, James, struggles to escape expectations held of him by white Londoners and the African-English alike.
ISBN-13: 9781567923865 Availability: On Our Shelves Now Published: David R. Godine Publisher, 07/01/2009
In this sprawling 1980 novel (recently translated), two narrative threads a generation apart allow us to cross vast tracts of time and space and thus to witness the decomposition of a proud, indigenous society. From the 1909 expulsion of Nour and his people, the North African Blue Men, by an incursion of Europeans, French colonial soldiers, to the tale of Lalla, a contemporary descendant of the tribe, we are forced to confront a societal dissolution that results from the invasion of Western European culture into the shantytowns of the present. Lalla has been led to Marseilles where, surrounded by morepeople than ever before in her life, she finds her deepest loneliness.Even the desert wind, a source of guidance to all throughoutthe novel, is lost in the cold, dirty labyrinth of the city. Nobelprize-winner LeClézio’s prose is thick and heady, conjuringimages that shimmer like mirages within the open space of thenarrative. His books are not to be passed through quickly, but occupied.
