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FROM: Sandy Westbrook <[removed]@crlc.org>
REC'D: 5/6/02, 11:05 AM
I offer up the following challenge:
I have a student looking for examples of fiction that deal with prisons,
prisoners and the fine arts. She is specifically looking at the way art can
build community or connections within the confines of a prison. "Art" can
be painting, music, writing, poetry, etc. The time frame can be past,
present, future - it doesn't really matter.
I tried the Fiction Catalog and What Do I Read Next? and found a couple
of titles that are possibilities but would like to offer more.
Any suggestions?Sandy Westbrook
Adult Services Librarian
South Windsor Public Library
South Windsor, CT 06074
Ph 860-644-1541
Fax 860-644-7645
[removed]@crlc.org
FROM: "Jeannine Cook" <[removed]@co.douglas.or.us>
REC'D: 5/7/02, 2:30 PM
You might check out Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, just published in
April. I haven't read it, but the blurb in PW sounds promising.
" From Publishers Weekly
Flanagan (The Sound of One Hand Clapping) has written a
Tasmanian version of Rimbaud's Season
in Hell, a mesmerizing portrait of human abjection and
sometimes elation set in a 19th-century Down
Under penal colony. A small-time forger of antiques in
contemporary Tasmania finds a mysterious
illustrated manuscript that recounts in harrowing detail
the rise and fall of a convict state on Sarah
Island, off the Tasmanian coast, in the 1830s. The text is
penned by William Gould, a forger and
thief (and an actual 19th-century convict) shipped from
England to a Tasmanian prison run as a
private kingdom by the Commandant, a lunatic tyrant in a
gold mask rumored to have been a
convict himself. The prison world consists of a lower
caste of convicts tormented with lengthy
floggings, vile food and various mechanical torture
devices by a small number of officers and
officials. Gould finagles his way into the good graces of
the island surgeon, Tobias Achilles
Lempriere, a fat fanatic of natural science, who has Gould
paint scientific illustrations of fish, with the
goal of publishing the definitive ichthyological work on
Sarah Island species. In Gould's hands,
however, the taxonomy of fish becomes his testimony to the
bizarre perversion of Europe's
technology and art wrought by the Commandant's mad
ambitions. Civilization, in this inverted world,
creates moral wilderness; science creates lies. Carefully
crafted and allusive, this blazing portrait of
Australia's colonial past will surely spread Flanagan's
reputation among American readers."--
Jeannine Cook
Adult Services Librarian
Douglas County Library
1409 NE Diamond Lake Blvd.
Roseburg OR 97470
[removed]@co.douglas.or.us
phone: (541)440-6013
fax: (541)440-6011
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