Literature

Softcover. Oakland CA, PM Press;, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. The first comprehensive account of how the rise of postwar youth culture was depicted in mass-market pulp fiction. As the young created new styles in music, fashion, and culture, pulp fiction shadowed their every move, hyping and exploiting their behavior, dress, and language for mass consumption and cheap thrills. With their lurid covers and wild, action-packed plots, these books reveal as much about society's deepest desires and fears as they do about the subcultures themselves. Featuring approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never before reprinted, along with 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles, the book goes behind the scenes to look at the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspiration and--often overlooked--the actual words they wrote. It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Hardcover. East Aurora, New York, The Roycrofters, 1st, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 164 pages, portraits of the author and subjects in the book with tissue guards. Embossed Half leather binding and decorated pages. Gilt top edge. Author's signature (in plate) on frontispiece portrait. Number 18 in The Little Journeys Series. A very handsome book.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 246 pages. In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Presence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. "Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe." Taking seriously Du Bois's allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois's Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts. Clean, like new.

University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press , 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Weintraub's compilation of Shaw's diaries reveal the day to day life of one of Britain's most famous playwrights. 558 pages. Vol. 1 only of a two volume set. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2014-09-22, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 765 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Bennington VT, Images from the Past, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Rudyard Kipling in Vermont tells the story of the dynamic years 1892-1896 with Kipling's own letters and memoirs, selected excerpts from his poetry, and the words of those who knew and admired him. More than thirty illustrations illustrate the little-known tale of a time he said "would be blessed to me for all my life." Kipling was born in Bombay, India, and was a prolific writer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He married an American wife and moved to the village of Brattleboro, VT. He only lived in Vermont for four years. But during that time he wrote his famous "Jungle Book" series. Family troubles forced him to move and the large estate he lived in over looking town fell into disrepair. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In a bright dust jacket. Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver.

Hardcover. University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 592 pages. Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era--from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup--he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1t, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Color illustrations throughout.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Frog Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Amy Wallace's first meeting with Carlos Castaneda, the infamous anthropologist-turned-shaman, whose books described meetings with Yaqui Indian spiritual teacher Don Juan. Castaneda's rise was meteoric in the late 1960s as he wrote massive bestsellers, inspired many to experiment with psychedelics, and was dubbed "The Godfather of the New Age". The possibility that Castaneda's experiences may have been fabricated did little to compromise his legend. As the daughter of best-selling novelist Irving Wallace, Amy was rarely shy around famous people. When her father insisted she meet Castaneda, she at first demurred. Little did she know that a delightful first meeting would begin a 20-year friendship, followed by her descent into the dramatic and deeply troubled affair chronicled in this book. Wallace reveals the inner workings of the "Cult of Carlos", run by a charismatic authoritarian in his sixties who controlled his young female followers through emotional abuse, mind games, bizarre rituals, dubious teachings, and sexual excess. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, Franklin Library, Ltd. Ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, full red leather binding with 3 raised bands on the spine. Gilt stamped boards and page edges. Includes the Franklin Library supplement sheet.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 163 pages, b&w photos. Light pencil marking to 10 pages, otherwise clean. A unique look into the subject area, and the contributory factors of people who engage in early esoteric based practice, in remote rural Philippines. The author is concise, and the book is informative and provides quite a balanced view of development with a view particularly to cultural and socio-economic influences.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 259 pages, photographic frontispiece, 4 leaves of plates; original blue cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, Autobiography of the English writer and founder of the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia Woolf. The fourth volume of the autobiography. Remainder line to edge, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Oakville Ontario , Mosaic Press , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 276 pages. B&W illustrations. Here is an affectionate look back at the outsized heroes who once occupied the imagination of millions of loyal readers. The Shadow. Tarzan. Doc Savage. Captain Future. The Spider. Zero. They were the original super guys - godfathers and inpsiration to the likes of Superman, Batman, and James Bond. Fascinating and informative, The Great Pulp Heroes is a lively and entertaining history of those fabulous characters, of them gaudy, glorious magazines that spawned them, and of the amazing wordsmiths who churned out their monthly adventures. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1st , 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 246 pages. Previous owner's signature on front flyleaf. Light spotting to edges. Very minor rubbing to cover edges. A nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 374 pages.Translated by Joan Pinkham, notes, bibliography, index, b/w photo plates, white boards/black cloth. Originally published Librairie Flammarion, Paris, 1988. First American Edition.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, reprint, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 171 pages. Volume 1 ONLY of a six volume set. Name and date on front fly leaf, otherwise clean, bright copy.

Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 402 pages. "Miss Lang focuses on the content of Pa Chin novels and short stories, which vividly describe the life of Chinese youth. She also pays great attention to the western, particularly Russian and French, influences on his political philosophy."

Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 524 pages. The finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage by V.S. Naipaul - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume spanning some forty years of travel and sustained meditations on our world. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Constable, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, blue cloth covers with silver titles. 354 pages. b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 274 pages, with b&w photographs. Very clean and tight copy. Unauthorized biography of Hunter Thompson. Perry takes us on a journey through Thompson's booze and drug fueled rise to fame. From a young yahoo in Louisville, Kentucky-drinking heavily and playing with his rifle, to the first hand secrets of Thompson's inventive and irreverent gonzo jounralism. A look at a man who was a horror to some, a hero to others.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 541 pages. It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Frederick Ungar, 1st thus, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 263 pages. 1st American Edition of this Abridged Translation. This is Kraus's masterpiece, with half of Europe as its stage. It is presented here in English for the first time, in an abridged version that preserves the essence of the 800-page original. Its influence on Brecht, Ionesco, and other playwrights is acknowledged. Mingling actual quotations, news reports, and government orders with Kraus's own satiric dialogue, this immense drama (never meaning to be performed) offers a vast fresco of events at the front and at home during, as it prophesied, the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, Kraus anticipated the development of atomic warfare and its threat to all mankind. Some of Kraus is untranslatable, but, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review, "Ungar has done us a benefit at least by bringing us a bit closer to this sharp-eyed, angry, prickly, lover-hater of mankind." INSCRIBED BY FREDERICK UNGAR, the editor and publisher on the half-title page. He also wrote the 14 page introduction. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Barbara CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 59 pages. Edition of 750 copies. This is one of the unsigned copies. Quarter black cloth with paper title label. Printed boards. Acetate dust jacket with light soil.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Two hardcover volumes in worn, soiled dust jackets. Dark green cloth covers with gilt titles to upper covers and spines. As a result of djs, both volumes are bright and clean, 261. 243 pages. No markings.

Softcover. NY, The Viking Press, 2nd pr., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor MI, The University of Michigan Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 354 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on title page. Light pencil marking to 5 pages, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 1st US, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 320 pages. Hardcover. Light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. France, Presses De La Oite, 1st Ltd. ed., 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, #996 of 1,500 Ltd Ed. of a speech given by the author in 1958. Slipcased. FRENCH TEXT

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 436 pages. Interviews with: Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Guillermo Cabera Infante. B&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 162 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1971, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The author tells of his childhood and early life up until the years after the acceptance of his first novel. This time included growing up in an intellectual Edwardian family, his education at Oxford, his involvement with the Secret Service, and his apprenticeship as a journalist. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 174 pages. B&w frontispiece portrait. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) had something to say about virtually all her contemporaries among the literati, and they returned the favor in full measure. This well articulated primary and secondary bibliography covers the complete canon and its critical reaction, with illuminating annotations complemented by a biographical sketch. Included also are three personal views of Parker-- by Joseph Bryan, III, Richard Lauterbach, and Wyatt Cooper. The accumulated evidence suggests that Parker should be considered a major figure in American letters not just America's wittiest woman who happened to write. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, N.Y., Carlton Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 287 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 225 pages, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half-title page. Minor dust jacket edge wear and spotting on top edge, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. London, John Lane, 1st, 1896, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, polished blue calf with ornate gilt rule to edges of both covers, spine with brown calf label with gilt lettering. Top edge gilt, blue and gray pattern endpapers. Decorative gilt design overall on spine. 107 pages, 6 etchings by E. Philip Pimlott. Edited by R.H. Case. A fine anthology of angling poetry, compiled by Buchan and published while he was still a student at Oxford. Sources include William Shakespeare, John Dennys, Phineas Fletcher, WilliamBrowne, Edmund Waller, John Floud, Sir Henry Wotton, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Basse, Izaak Walton, John Donne, John Chalkhill, Charles Cotton, John Bunyan, Alexander Pope, John Gay, James Thomson, John Armstrong, and others. Mild sunning to top edge of covers, ink name and short inscription dated '96 on first blank page. Otherwise clean and tight.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 480 pages. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well--a virtual Who's Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and TheNew York Times, among other adversaries. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal's life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal's life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal--novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights--has long needed.

Hardcover. London, Frederick Muller Limited, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 194 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Illustrated by Harry and Isle Toothill. Light bumping to bottom cover boards, light soiling.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Peterson's Magazine, 1st, 1864, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 12 issues bound in half leather, brown calf spine with raised bands, gilt lettering. All edges gilt. 12 monthly issues January - December 1864, 464 pages. With twelve (12) hand colored dress fashion plates, 12 color lithographed plates (some folding), numerous steel engravings and many wood engraved images throughout. Endpapers have tan spotting from aging of glue used in binding. Previous owner's name dated 1864 on blank prelim page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1998-10-26, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 181 pages, illustrated throughout with photos in b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry's writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, Melville House, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This is the original 30,000 word article Agee wrote for Fortune magazine in 1936 that was never published. Accompanied by 30 Walker Evans photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 338 pages, several b&w woodcut illustrations. Black cloth spine with marbled boards, top edge gilt. Author Theodore Morrison's copy with his signature on front fly leaf. Minor corner wear.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 512 pages, mild shelf wear. INSCRIBED BY BRODSKY on the front flyleaf with a little sketch of a sailboat. Dust jacket with light edgewear, closed teat on rear panel.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket that is taped to covers, 554 pages. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, John Day Company, 1st, 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 177 pages. Boards illustrated with duotone illustration, black cloth binding, b&w illustrations by Covarrubias. Spine lightly cocked, light edgewear to covers, previous owner's signature to front endpaper, pages crisp and unmarked; overall, a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st US, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 206 pages, with b&w illustrations. Very clean and tight copy. Remainder line bottom edge, otherwise unmarked.