Literature

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with minor wear, 278 pages. A re-examination of the roles played by authors, readers, scribes and texts in medieval literature, which describes how consideration of marks on the physical manuscript - elements added by scribes and readers - can shed light on interpretive issues that have puzzled modern readers. Light underlining to 18 pages in first chapter.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This book examines the far-reaching legacy of one of the great myths of classical antiquity. According to Greek legend, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the orders of Creon, king of Thebes. Creon sentenced Antigone to death, but, before the order could be executed, she committed suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon - between the state and the individual, between young and old, between men and women - has captured the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years. Antigone and Creon are as alive in the politics and poetics of our own day as they were in ancient Athens. Here, Steiner examines the treatment of the Antigone theme in Western art, literature and thought, leading us to look again at the unique influence Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture.

Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, original blue cloth-backed boards. Quarto. 17 pages & 8 plates. From a limited printing of 385 copies under the direction of Bruce Rogers. Also laid in :2 color photos and one b&w photo of the medallion. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Rarity Press, 1st thus, 1932, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, burgundy cloth covered boards, silver lettering on spine and sliver decoration on front cover still very bright. In a bright, edgeworn dust jacket with minor close tears. 100 b&w illustrations by Norman Lindsay.

Hardcover. Wakefield RI, Moyer Bell, 2nd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY O'CONNOR on the half-title page. O'Connor, who has had a career as an editor at Washington Square Press, Pinnacle and Popular Library, and as a cultural critic for Variety and on radio and TV (he's now a ski instructor in Vermont), originally broadcast these essays on WBAI Radio in New York City.

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. This book concerns itself with the different ways in which money is used, the relationships which then arise, and the institutions concerned in maintaining its various functions. Thomas Crump examines the emergence of institutions with familiar and distinctive monetary roles: the state, the market and the banking system. However, other uses of money - such as for gambling or the payment of fines - are also taken into account, in an exhaustive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject, which extends far beyond the range of conventional treatises on money. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st UK, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages. Translated from the French by Ralph Manheim.(London): Faber and Faber, (1982). First edition in English, first printing. "First published in 1982" statement to the copyright page. In this in-depth study of his life and his works, Robert explores Kafka's loneliness, his omission of the words 'lonely' and 'Jew' in his writings, compares his life with his allegories, and more. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 266 pages. Christian religion's influence on secular Victorian culture, especially literature. Clean copy.

Softcover. Hanover NH, Dartmouth College Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 277 pages. One of Rousseau?s later and most puzzling works and never before available in English, this neglected autobiographical piece was the product of the philosopher?s old age and sense of persecution. Long viewed simply as evidence of his growing paranoia, it consists of three dialogues between a character named ?Rousseau? and one identified only as ?Frenchman? who discuss the bad reputation and works of an author named ?Jean-Jacques.? Dialogues offers a fascinating retrospective of his literary career. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Facsimile reprint of 18th century edition; stapled wraps; 66 clean, umarked pages, plus introduction by Malcolm Kelsall. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Columbia MO, University of Missouri Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 356 pages with index, b&w illustrations. Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women in America. Among the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than three decades. She helped shape the careers of such great writers as Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright. A best-selling author herself, Fisher was also a deeply committed social activist. In Keeping Fires Night and Day, Mark J. Madigan collects much of Fisher's copious correspondence. With letters to Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Thurber, and E.B. White, he documents Fisher's personal and professional life and career in a way that no biography could. Set against the American historical and cultural landscape from 1900 to 1958, these letters offer a firsthand account of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women.

Hardcover. Lewiston NY, Edwin Mellen Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering, 424 pages plus appendix. This study provides an examination of the Spanish novelist Perez Galdos' turn to the stage in 1892 and his simultaneous shift in approach towards the roles of women in society. Faint pencil marking to about 25 pages in front of volume. Otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn and chipped dust jacket. Foreword by George Orwell. Introduction by Christopher Fyfe. 241 pages. Reprints two books by Irish novelist Joyce Cary (1888-1957), "The Case for African Freedom" (1941) and "Britain and West Africa" (1946), and three shorter magazine pieces. Illustrated in black and white, with three maps of Africa. Cary was English novelist who served in the Nigerian political service.

Hardcover. London, Frederick Warne, Revised Ed., 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 173 pages. Illustrated with 8 color and 30 b&w plates. Although Beatrix Potter is known and loved by generations of children brought up on "Peter Rabbit" and others, her life began in great joylessness and solitude. Drawing was her once fascination and her creative genius was able to flourish in the loneliness and isolation of her early years. Despite the fame that her skill was later to bring, she nevertheless preferred to maintain her privacy and hide behind the persona of a Lakeland farmer. Margaret's Lane biography recounts, with reference to letters and photographs, Beatrix Potter's sad childhood, her struggle for independence, her ill-fated love affair and happy marriage. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Lawrence Hill and Company, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 234 pages.Introduction by Jack Conroy. Other contributors include Nelson Algren, Langston Hughes, Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, William Carlos Williams, Michael Gold, Kenneth Patchen and Karl Shapiro. Clean, tight copy. Cheap paper tanning.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement, and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This fascinating book by Matei Calinescu is the first to focus on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. Calinescu analyzes fictional works by Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, and Henry James, among others, explaining how reading texts is related both to symbolic play or make-believe and to games with rules. He reviews the history of reading in modern times, discussing, for example, how the Reformation led to rereadings of Scripture and how the proliferation of books during the Enlightenment led to a shift from "intensive reading" to "extensive reading." Calinescu looks at the distinctions between reading and rereading from the perspectives of the age, situation, and gender of the individual reader. He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a select audience of "secret sharers," or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues persuasively that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 271 pages. The first English translation of the last work of Gogol to be published during his lifetime. The only important nonfiction prose work of the Russian novelist, the*e thirty-two critical essays, written in the form of personal letters, define Gogol's views on religion, morality, and aesthetics and provide a key to the underlying motives and messages of his earlier fiction, including Dead Souls and The Inspector General. Translated from the Russian by Jesse Zeldin.

Softcover. NY, Bellevue Literary Press, 1st, 2007, Softcover, 236 pages. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys from Russia to Italy to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Mcdowell, Obolensky, 1st, 1957, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with faded gilt lettering to spine, 347 pages. Edited with an introduction by John C. Thirlwall. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons."

Softcover. London, Between the Lines, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages. A 17,000 word interview, with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative list of quotations from Heaney's critics and reviewers. Also included is Heaney's poem, 'Known World'. Spine faded, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 346 pages. An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, 130 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Purple and orange striped boards with orange wrap-around title label. In a worn, chipped dust jacket currently covered in plastic. Chunk missing from dust jacket on rear bottom. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Gutersloh GR, C. Bertelsmann,, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 438 pages, chipped dust jacket. GERMAN TEXT. JULIA CHILD'S COPY with her signature, address and 1956 on the front fly leaf.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, April 30, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 274 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. In The Shadow Man, the bestselling author of Final Payments and The Company of Women elevates the memoir into an uncompromising and unforgettable art form as she seeks to learn the truth about her lost father. 20 photos.

Hardcover. NY, Spiegel & Grau, 1st, 2009-10-20, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 198 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Photos in color and b&w. SIGNED BY MORGAN on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Edinburgh, John Grant, Revised/Reprint, 1896, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 301 pages. Cloth boards. Previous owners bookplate on front inside cover. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 368 pages. Hardcover. Features: Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau, Harold Pinter, and more. Price clipped dust jacket with short closed tears along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1st US, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages. Translated from Russian by Malcolm Burr. Cloth covers, blue stamped titles, 3 b&w illustrated maps, blue top edge stain. Rubbing and light soiling to covers, spine lightly cocked, previous owner's bookplate and signature to front endpapers, light foxing and discoloration to endpapers, discoloration to page block ends; otherwise, a neat, tight copy of a scare book.

Hardcover. Brattleboro, VT, Stephen Daye Press, 2nd Printing, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, 39 pages, dust jacket edge fade and small chunks missing, otherwise, internally very clean and tight.

Hardcover. Bloomingdale, Indiana University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 290 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean and tight copy with only light edgewear to dust jacket and very light foxing to top text block. This classic work, first published in 1956, is now available in English. Along with Luthi's The European Folktale and Propp's The Morphology of the Folktale, Rohrich's Marchen und Wirklichkeit is considered a key text in folklore scholarship.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 2nd pr., 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 318 pages. SIGNED BY RICH on title page. Light soil to dust-jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Very good pictorial dust jacket in mylar with very minor edge wear. SIGNED BY AUTHOR with drawing on title page.

Hardcover. NY, Rinehart & Co., 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 241 pages. The author Cook was an English professor at Middlebury College for many years, and involved with Bread Loaf Writer's Conference almost from its inception, as Robert Frost was. INSCRIBED by Robert Frost (the subject) to Cook (the author).

Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 153 pages. SIGNED BY KOOSER on title page. Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska.

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. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 352 pages. Translated by Sam Taylor. As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an eleven-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier's fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious sixteen-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady. With a rhythm and intimacy to its prose characteristic of all de Rosnay's works, Manderley Forever is a vividly compelling portrait and celebration of an intriguing, hugely popular and (at the time) critically underrated writer.

Softcover. Louisville KY, Sarabande Books, 4th pr., 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 40 pages, b&w photos. Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence. The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY/London, Routledge, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 198 pages. Stigmata collects some of Helene Cixous' most intriguing meditations. A unique book, it is a testimony to an extraordinary writer. B&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Garland Publishing, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 327 pages. Clean, bright copy. No dj issued.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Company, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. A thoughtful biography of the too-short life of the woman who wrote one of the most controversial American novels of the 20th century.

Hardcover. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 166 pages. Virtues's place in Spanish drama is partly as one of the few to attempt tragedy, partly as one of the precursors of the national comedia, but above all as a pivotal figure in an important transitional period of Spain's political and cultural history. Clean copy.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Uphill with Archie is a beautifully written and deeply involving look at the life and the world of the great literary icon, poet Archibald MacLeish, by his youngest son. Partly an homage, partly an attempt to come to terms with the man (and the legend), Uphill with Archie speaks to all sons and daughters who have never completely resolved their feelings about powerful parents. Young William MacLeish grew up both captivated and cowed by the fame of a father who won Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and comparable honors for his work as a lawyer, playwright, teacher, and government official. William's mother, Ada, began her marriage as a successful concert singer in Paris but later felt compelled to give up her art for her family. When Archie was working for Henry Luce and Fortune magazine, his younger children, watched over by a governess, stayed with their grandfather in Connecticut. But it is of the time spent with his family at Uphill Farm, a beautiful old house above a Massachusetts hilltown, that MacLeish has his fondest and most telling memories: "Archie and Ada gave me great gifts: music, the sound of the language beautifully spoken, the draw of knowledge, the arts of humor," William writes. "I learned to perform for them, and in time found myself addicted to getting a nice tan from Archie's sun. And the more I bathed in his light, the harder I found it to go looking for my own."

Hardcover. NY, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a shelfworn dust jacket. 214 pages includes index, b&w photographs and illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of seven essays. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1937, Hardcover, red cloth. 119 pages, drawings by Bernadine Custer. Told for the first time, 40 years after author Rudyard Kipling and his family hurriedly left their home in Vermont, this story fills some blank pages in Kipling's life story. Author Fredric Van de Water had heard the true account from Kipling's brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, which followed smoldering tensions and a public trial. The Kiplings left in 1896, never to return. Several of Kipling's writings were put to paper in the Vermont home. First trade edition after a limited edition of 700. Clean.

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.