Literature

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages. Name on front fly leaf whited out, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 410 pages, b&w illustrations. Best known as the author of "Windows for the Crown Prince, " an account of her years as English tutor to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, Elizabeth Gray Vining now tells the full story of her life, including impressions of Japan that she omitted from her earlier book. Previous owner'e signature on Front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York: , Henry Holt, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 210 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with minor if any wear to edges.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 188 pages. SIGNED BY OFFUTT on title-page.

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages. Joyce Cary long a popular author among discriminating readers, is gaining a wider audience for his novels every year. This critical study of his work considers the developing relationship between his matter and his manner. It especially emphasizes his growth as artist and thinker. Looking closely at the language and structure of Cary's books, the author examines all the novels- the African ones, the historical ones, and the two trilogies most of them in detail. To gain an overall view he also considers Cary's nonfiction and some as yet unpublished material. While this study is essentially non-biographical, it does analyze Cary's interpretations of history, sociology and politics as they are gathered from the actions and words of his colorful characters. One of the most intriguing features of Dr. Wolkenfeld's book is the dialogue between characters of the various novels, where likenesses as well as dissimilarities, which reveal so much about Cary as a writer, become evident. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Frontiepiece photograph of the author as Lord Beaconsfield. 392 pages. Autobiography dealing with the author's life up to the mid 1930s. He was the brother of A E Housman, and was well-known in his own right as a writer of plays, as well as being active in the women's suffrage campaign and in the pacifist movement. A prolific writer with around a hundred published works to his name, Housman's output eventually covered all kinds of literature from socialist and pacifist pamphlets to children's stories. He wrote an autobiography, The Unexpected Years (1937), which, despite his record of controversial writing, said little about his homosexuality, the practice of which was then illegal. Mild shelf wear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, 408 and 388 pages. The secular Latin poetry of the Middle Ages is at once great in bulk and interesting in kind, embracing as it does lyrical, epical, satirical, philosophical, grammatical, and historical verse. The rhetorical tradition of the ancient world can be traced throughout its development, from the fifth to the thirteenth century, when the tradition passes over into the new literary vernaculars. No adequate English survey of this delightful and historically important literature has hitherto been made. These volumes form a sequel to the same author's 'History of Christian-Latin Poetry', and the two works together offer a complete introduction to the whole field of medieval Latin poetry. First published in 1934. Clean copies.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Facsimile reprint of 17th century (1754) edition; stapled wraps; 44 pages with a 12 page introduction by Jocelyn Harris.

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. London, Cecil Woolf , 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 80 pages, b&w illustrations by Brigid Peppin

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. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 736 pages. The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone, Twain's uncensored autobiography is available in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsupressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended. Volume 1 ONLY ( of a planned 3 volume set). Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A luminous collection of essays from Louise Gluck, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets. Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Gluck is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Gluck's second book of essays-her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Gluck's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection. Clean copy.

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. San Antonio TX, Wings Press, reprint, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 208 pages, b&w photos. On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a transformation that changed many lives beyond his own he made his skin black and traveled through the segregated Deep South. His odyssey of discovery was captured in journal entries, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th-century American racism ever written. More than 50 years later, this newly edited edition which is based on the original manuscript and includes a new design and added afterword gives fresh life to what is still considered a contemporary book. The story that earned respect from civil rights leaders and death threats from many others endures today as one of the great human and humanitarian documents of the era. Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, Exact Change, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 342 pages. INSCRIBED BY ESHLEMAN in red ink on the half-title page. Clean, like new.

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.

Softcover. Chicago, Chicago Review, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, literary journal with entire issue devoted to the poet. Fairly scarce. New and bright all around wraps. Poems by Dorn, plus an interview, correspondence to and from, LeRoi Jones and Tom Raworth, and Dale Smith, an interview with Eleni Sikelianos.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st U.S., 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 250 pages. Light blue and tan cloth cover, gilt lettering, very little wear. Dust jacket has minor wear to edges. Inside is bright and clean. A nice copy.

Hardcover. Pinceton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 315 pages. The Western ideal of individualism had a pervasive influence on the culture of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912). Janet Walker argues that this ideal also had an important influence on the development of the modern Japanese novel. Focusing on the work of four late Meiji writers, she analyzes their contribution to the development of a type of novel whose aim was the depiction of the modern Japanese individual. Professor Walker suggests that Meiji novels of the individual provided their readers with mirrors in which to confront their new-found sense of individuality. Her treatment of these novels as confessions allows her to discuss the development of modern Japanese literature and "the modern literary self" both in themselves and as they compare their prototypes and analogues in European literature. The author begins by examining the evolution of a literary concept of the inner self in Futabatei Shimei's novel Ukigumo (The Floating Clouds), Kitamura Tokoku's essays on the inner life, and Tayama Katai's I-novel Futon (The Quilt). She devotes the second half of her book to Shimazaki Toson, the Meiji novelist who was most influenced by the ideal of individualism. Here she traces Toson's development of a personal ideal of selfhood and analyzes in detail two examples of the lengthy confessional novel form that he created as a vehicle for its expression.

Softcover. New York, Interlink Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 276 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. Light fading to rear wrappers, otherwise clean, tight copy. The 37 stories which comprise this collection challenge the long-held stereotypes and provide a rare look at the everyday lives of common people in villages across Fujian province. Despite the efforts and influence of the male-dominant Confucian culture, the stories reflect women's voices and women's lives touched by power and independence.

Hardcover. NY, Random House;, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. Kurt Vonnegut's eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than two hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship.The letters begin in 1941, after the former schoolmates reunited at age nineteen, sparked a passionate summer romance, and promised to keep in touch when they headed off to their respective colleges. And they did, through Jane's conscientious studying and Kurt's struggle to pass chemistry. The letters continue after Kurt dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1943, while Jane in turn graduated and worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. They also detail Kurt's deployment to Europe in 1944, where he was taken prisoner of war and declared missing in action, and his eventual safe return home and the couple's marriage in 1945.

Softcover. Canada, Prince Edward Island Heritage Foundation, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 229 pages, Softcover with light wear to wrappers. b&w photographs, bibliography. Clean, tight 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. New York, Viking Penguin, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1974, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, first American edition. SIGNED BY BEDFORD on the half-title page. 769 pages plus index, b&w illustrations. Light damp-wrinkling to pages in last third of book. Lacks dust jacket.

Hardcover. Edinburgh/London, William Blackwood and Sons, 1st thus, 1893, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, 187 pages plus publisher's catalog in rear. "Carefully Re-Edited, with Sketches never before published." Mainly a reprint of Hawker's contributions to "Notes and Queries", "Household Words", "All the Year Round". Frontis. photo of Morwenstow Church, protected by tissue guard. Also pasted to inside front cover a clipping of two photos: Hawker and his second wife, taken about the time of their marriage.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 524 pages. Robert Graves was astonishingly prolific and worked in many genres. He wrote lyric poetry, scholarly studies of mythology, drama, criticism, and journalism, he translated from Latin, and is probably best known for his potboilers "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God," works that he considered purely commercial and took little interest in. And, as Miranda Seymour makes clear, he was as odd a duck as ever walked. His life was defined by the women to whom he devoted himself. "Abased himself" would perhaps be the better term. The first and most influential was the American Laura Riding, a second-rate poet who fancied herself some sort of prophetess who would save the world from war and turned Graves into her adoring puppy. Later in life Graves devoted himself to a series of young women, each of whom he claimed embodied "the goddess" in whose service he thought he dwelled. Seymour (a novelist herself) writes beautifully, and with the cooperation of key members of the Graves family she has produced what will surely be the definitive biography of Graves for years to come.

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. New York , Frederick A. Stokes, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 197 pages illustrated in b&w by Dick Rose. INSCRIBED BY LEAF on the front fly leaf. Leaf went on to write a number of successful children's books, including Ferdinand the Bull. Two-color dust jacket with light edgewear, chipping.

Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY SHATTUCK on the half-title page. 369 pages. An intellectual tour-de-force, Forbidden Knowledge is a study of the ethics of literary and scientific inquiry. Shattuck first approaches his subject indirectly, conducting an engaging tour of Western literature: Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then uses these tales to address the moral questions raised.

Softcover. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 165 pages, French text.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 270 pages. In the early eighties, Jennie Erdal was hired by a flamboyant British publisher she calls Tiger to be his specialist editor for Russian books. By degrees he co-opted her time and loyalty, to the point where she ended up becoming his ghostwriter for a huge nonfiction book on women, two glossy novels, and hundreds of newspaper columns, all published under his own name. She also wrote any number of his love letters. With often ironic directness and quiet comedy, Erdal relates how she became seduced into this peculiar job. On the way she makes fascinating excursions into her own private history, from vivid evocations of her Scottish Presbyterian childhood to moving observations on being an abandoned wife and lone parent to piercing insights into the very nature of literary creation. One of the smartest books about writing in years, Ghosting is a tour de force in which the author renders both Tiger and herself as compelling characters, connected to each other by a strange symbiosis. Their interaction is bizarre and also quite spooky; in the end this is a book about the very nature of identity, literary and otherwise. 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.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 512 pages. B&w illustrations. With this handsome book, David Sweetman, a biographer of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, brings together the dissolute lives of various artists who came to represent decadent fin-de-siecle Paris: Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, Alfred Jarry, and, of course, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As the author reminds us, imitations of the latter's work adorn the walls of French-themed bars worldwide and have become a shorthand for sanitized debauchery. Toulouse-Lautrec--absinthe drinker and brothel frequenter--was instrumental in the development of the poster, but what is his artistic legacy? Although Toulouse-Lautrec dominates the book's subtitle, Sweetman's sweep is much grander. In much the same way as his main subject was, Sweetman proves a sympathetic host to the women of Montmartre, tragic figures such as La Goulue, Jane Avril, and Suzanne Valadon, and he is particularly insightful on the singer Aristide Bruant's influence on the fledgling artist. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Claredon Press, 1st, 1888, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 690 pages plus 3 folding maps in rear. Greek text with English introduction and commentary. Ex-library copy with light stamping, residue. Rebound with spine labels. Clean, unmarked text.

Softcover. New York, Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 29 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR, number 289 of a limited edition of 350 copies, with photographs. Light edge wear, else, very clean and tight.

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. NY, Random House, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a pric-clipped dust jacket that has a bright red cover but fading to spine. 372 pages, clean copy. Describes the influence of Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers. The growth of that influence among Mexican-Americans and many other concerned Americans. The years when Chavez called for boycotts, and the greatest agricultural labor strike in U.S. and the greatest agricultural labor strike in U.S. history, the struggle for justice and a means to reverse the order of the system. A book about the man. Cesar Chavez.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 260 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Cincinnati, Poe & Hitchcock, 1st, 1860, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 762 pages, b&w illustrations. Cloth and leather covers. Some foxing to pages, edgewear to covers, some pages dog-eared, else a very nice, tight copy.

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.

Privately Printed for the Author by the Arden Press, 1st, 1912, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, ochre cloth covers with gilt title on spine, 132 pages, 3 b&w plates. A biographical study of Samuel Johnson's Jamaican servant. Mild shelf wear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, burgundy cloth, 281 pages. Translated and edited with an introduction by Francis Steegmuller. Light fading to spine, name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, letters, and diaries, an authorized biography of the critically acclaimed philosopher and novelist traces her personal life and literary and philosophical career, from her student days at Oxford, through her marriage to John Bayley, to Murdoch's remarkable influence on literary England, from 1940 to the present day.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 897 pages. John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and - in a concluding section, 'Personal Matters' - paragraphs on himself and his work. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. Through a series of trade-ups, the nephews turn Donald's old pencil stub into -- a steamship ticket to India! Off they go, and Donald is soon declared to be "Maharajah Donald" -- but there's a catch! Then, Donald accidentally buys a houseboat at an auction that leads to an encounter with a giant sea serpent! Next, "Santa's Stormy Visit," a Christmas story with none of the trimmings -- no man in a red suit, no snow (but a tropical hurricane!), no presents under the tree (no tree!) But still a charming holiday tale. And don't miss "Donald Duck's Atom Bomb!"As we circle back to Carl Barks's earlier stories, the Good Duck Artist delivers another superb collection of surprise, delight, comedy, adventure, and all-around cartooning brilliance. 193 pages of story and art, each meticulously restored and newly colored. Insightful story notes by an international panel of Barks experts. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed boards, 205 pages. Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. Clean copy.