Editor’s bookshelf

The Iranian American experience

Co-edited by SJSU English Professor Persis Karim, Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers (The University of Arkansas Press) is a groundbreaking anthology that includes the work of 27 authors whose fictions “shake up any easy assumptions that the reader may hold about Iran,” says author Zara Houshmand. Notes Publishers Weekly: “The characters in each story demonstrate great resilience … in the face of political and cultural challenges.”

Data dynamics

Data centers—boring? Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and author Douglas Alger, ’89 Journalism, doesn’t think so. In The Art of the Data Center: A Look Inside the World’s Most Innovative and Compelling Computing Environments (Prentice Hall), he treats the reader to a tour of 18 state-of-the-art data centers, including one that was built into a 1920s chapel and another that was inspired by a chicken coop. A “rare … holistic view” of data center design and construction, according to the publisher.

Combing the past for answers

Raised Catholic in California, Paris-based New York Times reporter Doreen Carvajal, ’78 Journalism, investigates her family’s Sephardic Jewish roots and forced conversion to Christianity during the Inquisition in a mixture of memoir and reportage that the Chicago Tribune describes as “unforgettable.” The Forgetting River: A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity, and the Inquisition (Riverhead Hardcover) received a starred review from Kirkus and the accolade “darkly poetic” from the Christian Science Monitor.

Silicon Valley observed

“This first collection (of poetry) reads like a fourth or fifth,” praises Dorianne Laux of In the Buddha Factory (Truman State University Press) by Alan Soldofsky, director of SJSU’s Creative Writing Program. “Through a mastery of style and language placed against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, Soldofsky explores the tensions of opposites,” says Sandra McPherson. “Every poem here approaches its subject with wonder and respect.”