Literature

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. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, 150 pages, b&w photo illustrations. Dust jacket present but badly worn, chipped. Book condition is very good. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Also INSCRIBED BY VAN VECHTEN on front fly leaf: "For Dannie with fond affection from Carlo/April 6 1955/New York". Laid-in: an original b&w photo/postcard embossed "Photograph by Carl Van Vechten", dark exposure with 3 unidentified individuals. With verso handwritten note signed Carlo with a mailing date of 12/30/1958. Also: 4-page mimeographed memorial (speech) by George S. Schuyler dated December 23 1964 and a similar one (5-page) by Lincoln Kirstein. Several clippings. obituaries on his passing at age 84.

Hardcover. Watertown, MA, Charlesbridge, 1st, 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.

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.

Softcover. Dublin NH, William L Bauhan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 163 pages. An unconventional family idyll in pastoral Bucks County, Pennsylvania of the 1930?s is suddenly broken to pieces by the arrival of a band of writers led by poets Robert Graves and especially Laura Riding. Told from the perspective of her 12-year-old self, the author paints an evocative portrait of a family, friends, childhood adventures and events against the background of a countryside still threaded with dirt roads winding past meadows and woodland, not a shopping mall in sight.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 447 pages, b&w illustrations. Sylvia Beach ran a bookshop in Paris in the 1920s and 30s and was at the heart of the literary world there which also included Hemingway, Pound, Flanner, Gide, and of course Joyce whose novel "Ulysses" she published. Clean, bright copy.

Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 2nd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages. Sunning to spine, else near fine in wrappers. Edited by Anne Wright. A volume in the "Poets on Poetry". Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

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, Knopf, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 227 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, else a clean, tight copy. Naipaul presents here four essays about the "half-made" societies, those still suffering from the profound deprivations of colonialism and prey to corruption." He examines the role of Eva Peron as the catalyst for violence in Argentina, with its yearning for a European culture and the physical, historical, cultural reality of the land in which the native Indians were wiped out and the colonialists took over. He writes of the infamous Michael X in Trinidad whose pretensions to power and destiny led to the man's insanity and execution following two pointless murders. Shorter essays address nihilism in the Congo and Naipaul's take on Joseph Conrad and the Heart of Darkness.

Hardcover. New Castle DE, Oak Knoll Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 500 pages plus CD. This bibliography documents all phases of Vidal's ongoing remarkable work. It focuses on Gore Vidal as a writer from 1940 through June, 2009. In two volumes (second on CD containing text and images plus 120 pages), this is the definitive, comprehensive, and descriptive bibliography of his work and is a valuable reference book for libraries, collectors, scholars, booksellers. Lacks dust jacket, a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 292 pages, b&w plates. An affectionate and mostly literal account of the early years of Williamson's growing family, based in part on a series of articles called 'Tales of My Children' which he had contributed to 'Family' in 1935. With a frontispiece and sixteen photographs by the author. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Canongate, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. A re-telling of the story of Odysseus, with his wife Penelope and her twelve maids narrating from their viewpoint and with their insights. Previous owner's inscription on half-title page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and sunned dust jacket, 159 pages. Creative talent is rapacious, and to speak of writers as influencing each other is to make tender what is often harshly acquisitive. Writers do not flow into each other like waves, but expropriate, by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override, exercising the right of eminent domain. Like rival sovereignties, Yeats and the five writers here balanced with him - Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Auden - take each other into account. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 335 pages. Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity-the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours-is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, Name on front fly leaf, several pages with light ink markings.

Softcover. Ft., Texas Christian University, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 435 pages. INSCRIBED BY BONAZZI on the title page. This authorized biography by Robert Bonazzi, is based on John Howard Griffin's Journals from 1950-1980. Griffin was blinded in the South Seas during WWII, but regained sight in 1957, after which he wrote the classic Black Like Me. Bonazzi follows Griffin year by year after 1961, when Griffin toured the globe as a lecturer on human rights.

Softcover. NY, Spuyten Duyvil, 1st, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 187 pages, Essays on contemporary American literature. Small bump to edge causing a slight wave to top edge, Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 391 pages. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on the half-title page and also SIGNED on the title page. In Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of Beston, scholar Daniel Payne-granted unrestricted access to the writer's archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family-has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 177 pages. Perhaps the most significant and influential figure in this century's wave of American realism, Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is credited not only with reviving the short story as an artistically legitimate form, but also with perfecting minimalist fiction. Moving chronologically through Carver's complete short fiction canon and examining key stories in depth, Ewing Campbell traces the author's development through and beyond literary minimalism, into the tradition of tragic allegory. He explores Carvers persistent use of myth and archetype; motifs of the grotesque; religious iconography; and oppressed, spiritually paralyzed characters. From the earliest stories through the latest, Campbell illuminates Carvers constant fascination with the way individuals connect or fail to connect with one another. Clean 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. 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

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. Light scratch top rear cover, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt , 2nd, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 215 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. 1/4 black cloth, 3/4 green paper. Gilt lettering on spine. Color pictorial dj with photograph of author.

Hardcover. Hanover, NH, University Press of New England , reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 195 pages. hardcover with dust jacket. Blue cloth boards with gilt lettering along spine. Dust jacket his shelf worn with fading to spine. Otherwise, tight clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Times Books, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 273 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY NOEL on title-page. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY/London, M. Walter Dunne, reprint, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes from the Works of Gustav Flaubert published in 1904 in ten volumes, #103 of 999 copies. Gray cloth covers, Introduction by Ferdinand Brunetiere and a Preface by Robert Arnot. Clean set.

Hardcover. London, Hutchinson & Co, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 128 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Brick cloth covered boards with gilt titles to spine. Light foxing to endpapers. Frontis illustration, Eden Phillpotts, in black & white. Toning throughout, tight binding with clean pages throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus Crime, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 544 pages. It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year--more than thirty years after her death--and it shows no signs of slowing. But who was the woman behind these mystifying, yet eternally pleasing, puzzlers? Thompson reveals the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up, explores her relationships, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the many mysteries still surrounding Christie's life, most notably, her eleven-day disappearance in 1926.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Counterpoint, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages. Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte's writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte's stories was retold to illustrate a point about conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt, Malaparte's autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World War II. Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a book attacking totalitarianism and Hitler's reign, Mussolini, in no position to support such a body of work, stripped him of his National Fascist Party membership and sent him to internal exile on the island of Lipari. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Milano daily newspaper. His dispatches from the next three years would be largely suppressed by the Italian government, but reverberated among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war.

Hardcover. Cambridge, MA , Harvard University Press, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. INSCRIBED TO LOUIS UNTEMEYER BY WHITMAN on half-title. Title-page engraving by Michael McCurdy (repeated on dust jacket ). Dust jacket with light edgewear.

Hardcover. Canada, Bond Street Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 378 pages. Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is a brilliant and highly readable biography of a literary figure of world-wide reputation. Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as "heart of darkness" and "The horror! The horror!" have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts. His popular legacy extends to Latin American fiction, to the spy novel, to the terrorist and anarchist character, and to film. The writers he has influenced range from T. S. Eliot to William Faulkner to V. S. Naipaul and John Le Carre. For a writer of "difficult" fiction he has enjoyed a remarkably wide impact, yet as Marlow proclaims in Lord Jim of the figure whose story he tells,"he was one of us," and so Conrad remains in fascinating ways.

Hardcover. London, Hogarth Press, Reprint, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket. 206 pages. Ex-library copy with minimal marking. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Liverpool, Caxton Press, 1st, 1820, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 1527 pages, b&w frontispiece. Half-leather covers w/ faded gilt lettering on spine. Edge wear, soiling to boards. Previous owner's signature and markings on front fly leaf. Light staining, yellowing to pages. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 337 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Essays by the New York City cultural critic; examines the work of artists, filmmakers and writers ranging from Anton Chekov to J. K. Rowling, including Stanley Kubrick, The Sopranos, Sex in the City, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Barbara Kingsolver. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 259 pages. When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket that's unclipped. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London , B. Blake, 1st Thus, 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 848 pages. Hardcover. Marbled edges and endpapers. Raised bands on spine. Clipping of a silhouette of Edward Gibbon pasted on to front end paper. Previous owners notes in pencil on front endpapers. Wear to covers, especially corners. Rubbing. Chipping at spine. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1st US, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering to spine. There are two small puncture holes in cloth spine, corresponding holes to dust jacket. Otherwise a very good copy with age-toning to edges and spine of dust jacket.

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. Lathem, New York, British American Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 269 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. Mancheser, U.K., Manchester University, Reprint, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 221 pages. Foreword by George Melly. Highlighting on two pages. B&W photos and illustrations. Street Noises combines the diverse materials of mass culture with literary and archival sources, to produce an innovative and critical re-reading of twentieth-century Paris as the city of the people and of cultural modernity. It concentrates on popular song and opera, cultural theory and records of police surveillance (such as the unpublished archives concerning the sexual mores of sailors in Toulon), sensational weekly magazines (including the weekly Detective Magazine with its remarkable photomontage) and writers of the Academie Goncourt. The author picks out their common realisation of the experience of the city, also showing how the faits divers and the entertainment industries frame the writing of a Benjamin, a Colette or a Genet. Rifkin reworks modern critical theory through these sources, reflecting on its relation to the production of mass cultures.

Hardcover. Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly edgeworn dust jacket. 239 pages including index. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins is widely regarded as "the father of the detective story." How curious that his own life has puzzled investigators despite numerous attempts to unravel it. Collins lived a publicly Victorian existence as a contemporary of Dickens, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake in mid-19th-century England. Yet upon his death he left a will dividing his estate equally -- between two mistresses.

Hardcover. London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1st, 1817, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 3/4 brown calf over marbled boards, black leather spine label with gilt lettering. 303 pages. Containing, among others, many letters from Alexander Pope, and three from Dr. Johnson, being addressed to Francis Fowke, Joseph Fowke and Samuel Richardson. Mild wear to spine, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, two-volume set complete. Matching dark brown cloth covers stamped in black and gilt, top edge gilt. 639; vi, 653 pages; index, bibliography, frontispiece portrait in each volume - one a quite formal portrait of Voltaire in his prime, the other a sketch of him in old age. Covers show light wear, name on title pages. This is the second printing, the first published a year earlier. A comprehensive life of the great Enlightenment writer. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In these extraordinary letters, we see May Sarton in all her complexities and are privy to her tangled relationship with Juliette Huxley, whom May considered her muse and the greatest love of her life. May Sarton's love for Juliette Huxley, ignited that first moment she saw her in 1936, transcended sixty years of friendship, passion, rejection, silence, and reconciliation. The letters chart their meeting, May's affair with Juliette's husband Julian (brother of Aldous Huxley) before the war, her intense involvement with Juliette after the war, and the rich, ardent friendship that endured until Juliette's death. While May's intimate relationship with Julian was not a secret, May's more powerful romance with Juliette was. May's fiery passion was a seductive yet sometimes destructive force. Her feelings for and demands on Juliette were often overwhelming to them both. In fact, Juliette refused all contact with May for nearly twenty-five years. Their reconciliation, after Julian's death, wasn't so much a rekindling as it was a testament to the profound affinity between them. Theirs was a relationship rife with complications and misunderstandings but the deep love and compassion they shared for one another prevailed. Included in this book are Sarton's original drafts of an introduction to these letters. 400 pages including index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 119 pages. A book on linguistics by Noam Chomsky, written with the purpose of deepening 'our understanding of the nature of language and the mental processes and structures that underlie its use and acquisition'. Chomsky wished to shed light on these underlying structures of the human language, and subsequently whether one can infer the nature of an organism from its language. Cartesian linguistics refers to a form of linguistics developed during the time of RenE Descartes, a prominent 17th century philosopher whose ideas continue to influence modern philosophy. In Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky traces the development of linguistic theory from Descartes to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that is, from the period of the Enlightenment directly up to Romanticism. The central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics maintains that the general features of grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Burbank CA, DC Comics, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. These groundbreaking classic stories--which cemented Superman's place as the medium's most enduring hero--are gathered for the first time in this singular, expansive collection. Collects all the Man of Steel's tales from ACTION COMICS #48-65, SUPERMAN #16-24 and WORLD'S FINEST COMICS #6-10 and includes a foreword by legendary Superman editor Mike Carlin. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Routledge, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 190 pages. This book examines Gore Vidal's lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing - sex, politics, and religion - this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal's portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal's other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967-2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal's careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Clean copy.