Az Idegen nyelvi Részleg könyvajánlója 2009. január

Born on March five, 1948 in Albuquerque, new Mexico and of mixed Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry, Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on a Laguna Pueblo reservation.
Ceremony is set on the same Laguna Pueblo reservation where she grew up. Pueblo Indians refers to the group of Native Americans, including Hopi, Zuni, and Laguna, from the Pueblo crescent, which runs from central new Mexico through northeastern Arizona.
Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during Worls War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.
Tayos quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to the ancient stories of his people.

All the stories in Cathedral are different; some funny, some hauntingly sad. Each has its own individual and curious power' Daily Telegraph
This collection of short stories by Raymond Carver offers a series of insights into ordinary American people. The characters seem to have uneventful lives, but each is facing a moment of change either of outlook, circumstances or both. Carver writes so economically that it is not hard to guess he was also a poet. Using clear, simple language, he communicates whole lives in few words and the collection's title story hints at how challenging this is. A nameless narrator tries to describe what a cathedral looks like to a blind man. His struggle to articulate the concept brings him first to despair and shame 'I can't tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn't in me to do it.' and then to empathy as the two men begin to draw the cathedral together, the blind man tracing the pen lines with his hands.
 Not all of Carver's characters reach self-knowledge or find out how to communicate. There are drunks and other losers who are left in their own personal trap be it a sofa, drying-out clinic, waiting room or motel. In part, these characters act as proof that Carver is writing about the real. Carver may believe in the power of relationships, but he also has the honesty to admit there are lousy ones. He writes in 'The Train' that 'The world is filled with business of every sort.' Carver's business is to describe it, brilliantly. (Kirkus UK)

Lost in the Funhouse by John Bart is a collection of loosely connected short stories that was originally published  in 1968. These postmodern stories examine the art of fiction writing, among other things, and seem to undermine the conventional and predictable nature of fiction. In the fourteen stories, Barth presents a literary "funhouse," a dense maze that weaves in and out of plot, narration, and a self-conscious attention to the process of writing itself.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. In a series of thoughtful first-person passages interspersed throughout, Sheriff Bell laments the changing world, wrestles with an uncomfortable memory from his service in WWII and—a soft ray of light in a book so steeped in bloodshed—rejoices in the great good fortune of his marriage. While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life.