Literature

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.

Softcover. Middletown PA, Pennsylvania State University, 1st, 1983, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Red perfect bound wrappers, 176 pages. Covers with a few faint creases, spine slightly faded, mild wave to book. Prints Williams' 80-page 1914 little red notebook in exact-size facsimiles with a transcription and two additional essays from his son William Eric Williams; additional contributions by Reed Whittemore, James Laughlin, Cecelia Tichi, Peter Schmidt, Mary Ellen Solt, Henry Sayre, Emily Wallace, Louis Martz and Albert Sonnenfeld. The journal showcases scholarly essays on any aspect of the life and work of William Carlos Williams.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, red cloth in a worn and chipped dust jacket with closed tears, 191 pages with index. Dr. Worcester presents a theory of satire, surveying the whole field since Dryden's Discourse of the Origin of Satire and drawing illustrations not only from English but from classical, French, German, and American literature. At the same time he makes a penetrating study of irony and its uses. Name on inside front cover otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Cambridge University Press /Macmillan, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 174 pages, color frontis. portrait of the author, several b&w plates. Flap price crossed out otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages. This book offers eleven essays on Fante's career, ranging from close thematic analysis of individual stories and novels to broadly informed assessments of Fante's life and art in the context of his times. Major areas explored in the book include Fante's treatment of the Italian-American experience; his relationship to other American writers of the 1930s and beyond; the deeply Catholic nature of Fante's fiction; his unique and still-seminal vision of Los Angeles; and his lifelong concern to render in fiction both the comedy and the horrors of the writing life. Clean copy.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, State University of New York , 2nd pr., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 350 pages. The contributors discuss the current debate about what philosophy is, how it works, and how Nietzsche's thought clarifies or complicates its understanding. They represent a wide range of views and practices, some aggressively postmodern in their approach, some profoundly skeptical about postmodernism. Although the issue of postmodernism is the central focus, the essays also touch on many other areas of interest to readers of Nietzsche. Spine faded, light pencil underlining to a few pages.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 396 pages. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the quintessential American fairy tale. Michael Patrick Hearn, the world's leading Oz scholar, now provides a fascinating new annotation that not only reacquaints readers with the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion, but also illuminates the colorful background of this treasured American classic. This edition explores numerous contemporary references, provides character sources, and explains the actual meaning of the word "Oz." A facsimile of the rare 1900 first edition appears with the original drawings by W.W. Denslow, as well as 25 previously unpublished illustrations. There is a bibliography of L. Frank Baum's published work, every notable "Oz" edition, and the stage and cinematic productions from 1939's The Wizard of Oz, to the 1974 Broadway hit, The Wiz. A beautiful, awe-inspiring work, The Annotated Wizard of Oz is an enduring tribute to the timeless joy of The Wizard of Oz, and a classic to rival Baum's own. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 427 pages. This substantial collection of nonfiction spans over two decades, from 1983 to 2005. It encompasses autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to significant literary works. Notable inclusions are her reflections on reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at nineteen, discussions on the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on The Handmaid's Tale, and her New York Times Book Review piece that contributed to the success of Orhan Pamuk's Snow. The collection also features a poignant Letter to America written after September 11, 2001, and a retrospective on a family trip to Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 185 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 367 pages. (previously published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1966). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 200 pages. Critical essays on Charles Simic, John Ashbery, Stephen Dobyns and Charles Wright. SIGNED on title page by Stitts, also INSCRIBED on the front fly leaf by him. Personal letter from author also laid in. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes in a slipcase, light gray and light green jackets over beige cloth. 258, 277 numbered pages. The Life of the Mind is the final work by the political theorist, philosopher, and feminist thinker. This fascinating book investigates thought itself as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from Arendt's previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this is an exploration of the mind's activities she considered to be the most fundamental. The result is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity in terms of thinking, willing, and judging. Stated First Editions with 2 as lowest number. Jacket spines sunned and faded. Light spotting to text block edges. Clean, no markings.

Hardcover. NY, Grossman Publishers, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 272 pages. Discussion of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, John Patterson and Friends, 1st, 1924, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 25 pages, b&w frontispiece portrait of Stevenson, green cloth spine over patterned boards. Some wear, fraying to spine, light residue to front pastedown where bookplate may have resided.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean copy. An autobiography covering the first eleven years of the famed Nigerian poet and dramatist.

Hardcover. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 214 pages. Minor shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy in excellent condition.

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 332 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket with slight crease to rear cover, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 1997, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Some soiling to top page block, otherwise clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Adhesive residue on rear dust jacket.

Hardcover. Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 217 pages. Previous owners inscription at top right corner of front endpaper. Dust jacket shows light wear. Clean, tight copy.

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. 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. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.

Softcover. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 355 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics.

Hardcover. New York, Fred De Fau & Company, reprints, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two volumes, hardcovers. 810 pages total. B/w frontipieces with tissue guards. B/w illustrations throughout. Top edges gilt. Dark green cloth boards, gilt titles on spines, some light shelf wear. Tanning to pages and edges from age. Split at gutter of Introduction page in vol. 1, doesn't affect binding, no pages loose. Bindings good. Pages unmarked. Spines straight. The second of the three Valois romances, a continuation of Marguerite de Valois. Takes up the story three years later with Henry III seated, but not securely, on the throne.

Softcover. Willamette, Willamette Week, 1st wraps, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Columns from her early column in the Willamette Week newspaper. SIGNED BY DUNN.

Hardcover. US, Casanova Press, Ltd.Ed., 1935, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 71 pages. Covers worn, spine faded, frayed. Slight browning to pages. SIGNED BY FISHER. Number 282 of 300.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd pr., 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 414 pages, b&w illustrations. Very good, clean, in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. World famous at twenty-four, brilliant and reckless, hard-living and scandalous, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he ever experienced war first-hand. So true was his portrait of a young man who runs from his first confrontation with battle that Civil War veterans argued about whose regiment Crane had been in. Considered by H.G. Wells as "beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation," Crane was also famous in his time as an unforgettable personality, an Adonis with tawny hair and gray-blue eyes that Willa Cather described as "full of luster and changing lights." A lover of women and truth at any cost, Crane, in his short life, paid dearly for both. He alienated the New York police when he testified against a policeman on behalf of a prostitute falsely accused of soliciting, forcing him to live the rest of his short life as an expatriate in England. Reporting on the Spanish American War, Crane described the Rough Riders blundering into a trap after arriving in Cuba, infuriating Roosevelt. He died tragically young, leaving behind a handful of fine short stories, including The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel, along with war reporting, novels, and poetry.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated frontispiece etching of Blenheim. Burgundy cloth with gilt titles and decoration, top edge gilt. The memoirs of the author of "Land of Hope and Glory." Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

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.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 316 pages. Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1951, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to spine, 263 pages. Pencil underlining to first 20 pages, otherwise clean. Discusses the works of postwar writers of the Forties, such as Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Alfred Hayes and others; along with three writers of the Twenties: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, second printing, 316 pages plus index, sewn paperback cover price $2.45, very good lightly used copy.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

Hardcover. Watertown, MA, Charlesbridge, reprint , 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, non-paginated. Extensive b&w woodcut illustrations throughout. Gilt titles on spine and cover. Color illustration on front cover. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as 'the poet laureate of appetite' (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch collects many of his food pieces for the first time - and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, silver lettering, 152 pages. Light pencil marking in text.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 551 pages, illustrated, notes and sources, Anthony Trollope's works, index. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Unmuzzled Ox, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 117 pages. publisher's ads, introduction, libretto, illustrated with photos and collages, very good literary arts journal. Clean copy. The libretto of an almost-forgotten opera is translated by a poet of the very first rank, W.H. Auden.

Hardcover. London, Arthur Baker, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, worn dust jacket with a large chunk gone from front panel. Book is bright and clean, 180 pages. Illustrated with color and b&w plates by John Leech. A biography of the novelist who wrote of country sports like hunting in a comical way.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st Ltd. Ed., 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a tan dust wrapper with black lettering, 111 pages. A tight, lovely first edition of Brown's first book, a study of the works of the just-deceased and little-known New England poet and essayist Guiney (1861-1920). The frontispiece, a head and shoulders wood engraving of a young woman (presumably Guiney) wearing a crown of laurels, is signed boldly in pencil just below the image by famed wood engraver TIMOTHY COLE (1852-1931). ALSO INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR BROWN on the front fly leaf. Number 11 of 100 special copies.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth stamped in gilt, 3 colors. Beautiful gilt and sihouette vignette of the London skyline. 80 black and white drawings by Joseph Pennell. Top edge gilt. A collection of periodical pieces written over a span of thirty years by James, all about his travels in England. Name and date on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare Head Press, Ltd. Ed., 1908, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Eight hardcover volumes. The complete set published in an edition of 1060 copies. This set bound in gray boards with green cloth spines. Black lettering to spines, title pages in red and black, untrimmed edges. Mild wear to boards, Vol. 6 with cracked hinges and some pencil marking, otherwise a clean set. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE AND WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Biblioasis, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages. Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Cameos by Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Grazer, Candida Donadio, Crazy Joe Gallo, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Richardson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and the irreplaceable Elaine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Foreword by Joseph Frank. Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. The general direction is tow Erich Kahler sees cultural history as a subtle process in which reality plays upon consciousness and consciousness itself is forever transforming reality. He traces the ebb and flow of this relationship by studying changes in narrative form from its beginnings in the Gilgamesh Cycle to the end of the eighteenth century. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 947 pages. Complete in one volume. Revised and annotated by Charles S. Singleton. Singleton preserves the genius of Payne's language and style, but removes the Victorianisms that intrude upon the enjoyment of contemporary readers. He adds essential annotation and original interpretation to round out this unexcelled English edition of Boccaccio's great work. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 64 pages, facsimile reprint of a pamphlet, an early feminist document in the form of a poem with a 14 page introduction by Gae Holladay. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 474 pages. This wonderful collection contains all of Bogan's criticism, most of it written during her many years as poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine. "One does not easily recall another writer of such stature who served her fellow writers, and the reading public, for so long, or with such pertinence and distinction." She lived from 1897-1970. Flap price crossed out with smaller price in ink. Otherwise like new condition.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt & Co., 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray boards with a black cloth spine with gilt lettering. Name and ownership stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st US, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 384 pages. Bookplate on inside front cover, small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.