Literature

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 202 pages. Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life. Intensely reserved, Ginzburg said that she "crept toward autobiography stealthily like a wolf." But she did openly discuss her life and her work in an extraordinary series of interviews for Italian radio in 1990. Never before published in English, It's Hard to Talk about Yourself presents a vivid portrait of Ginzburg in her own words on the forces that shaped her remarkable life-politics, publishing, literature, and family. This fluid translation will join Ginzburg's autobiography, Family Sayings, as one of the most important records of her life and, as the editors write in their preface, "the last, unexpected, original book by Natalia Ginzburg."

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages. The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910-1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse. The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia. Clean 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.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st US, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 396 pages. Illustrated with forty-six photographs. Small name stamp on front fly leaf otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 217 pages. Includes essays on William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Nathaniel Tarn, Thom Gunn and more. Notes, bibliography. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, CA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 77 pages. Softcover. Augustan Reprint Society. Pamphlet with staple binding. Light tanning to cover, cover is becoming detached from bound pages. No pages missing or ripped. Very good condition. Previous owner's name written on front cover. Some underlining and brief notes written inside (pencil)."The most satisfactory of Collins' many pamphlets and books..."

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

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

Hardcover. New York, 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. 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. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 201 pages. A fascinating look at the theories behind fairy tales and fantasy. The works of J.R.R.Tolkien and his essay 'On Fairy Stories' is a major focus of the book as are German fairy tales or Marchen and Marx and Fairy tales. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, First Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 249 pages. Hardcover. Grey cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic sleeve. Black & white illustrations, tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

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. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 274 pages. Faint foxing to upper edge of brodart protected dust jacket and to top edge, else a very nice, tight copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 426 pages. How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Newark DE, Juan De LA Cuesta , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. clean copy.

Hardcover. Syracuse, N.Y., Syracuse University, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 241 pages. Light edge wear, soiling to price-clipped dust jacket. Foxing to top and fore-edge. Covers slightly warped. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, W W Norton & Co Inc, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 568 pages. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. Profiles the enigmatic soldier, statesman, and man of letters, offering a wealth of never-before-published missives that shed light on his role in the Arab revolt, his sexuality, and his retreat into obscurity.

Hardcover. Boston, New York Graphic Society, BC Ed,, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, black cloth covers, red title and author lettering to the spine. 239 pages, 100 b&w illustrations. With Contributions by Alan Barbour & Matei Cazacu. Book club edition in very nice condition.

Hardcover. Charlestown MA, Printed and Sold By Samuel Etheridge, Revised Ed., 1810, Book: Very Good, Hardcovers, two volumes complete, 432 and 448 pages. bound in 3/4 calf, with red leather spine labels intact, bindings tight. New corrected edition. A collection of biographical studies on the life of important poets in the cannon of English literature, including: Cowley, Milton, Blackmore, Granville, Somerville, Thomson, Mallet, and Lyttelton. Written by Samuel Johnson, an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. With the original advertisement to the first edition. originally published in 1779-81. Light edgewear to covers, mild water stain to first 4 pages of Vol. 2, otherwise clean, mild foxing, very good set overall.

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. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott , 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 251 pages. Hal Borland writes about his boyhood as part of a homesteading family in Eastern Colorado. A nice copy of the first edition, as stated on the copyright page. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

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.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury Academic, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed pictorial boards, 362 pages. The essays collected in this volume were written to mark the centenary of the birth of Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the twentieth centurys most influential classical scholars. Between them, they explore the two major sides of his career: his groundbreaking scholarship on Greek language, literature and history, and the more public-facing roles he assumed in universities and at the British Academy which brought him into the national spotlight, not without some notoriety, in his later years.The contributors consider the various facets of Dover's life and work from a range of perspectives which reflect the burgeoning field of the history of scholarship. Some contributors were students and colleagues of Dovers at different stages of his career, while others are themselves leading experts in areas of Classics to which he devoted his energies. Chapters on his academic publications and on the controversies he faced in the public realm are not bland celebrations of his legacy but offer critical assessments of his motivations and achievements, cumulatively demonstrating that there is much to be learned not just about Dover himself but also about the fields he helped to shape. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Recounts the life of the English poet who died during World War I, looks at the group of his friends and fellow poets known as the Neo-Pagans, and discusses the influence of homosexuality on his life. His sonnet "The Soldier" and early death in World War I made British poet Rupert Brooke a key figure in the nation's myth of patriotism and youthful valor. Biographer Delaney places him among the Neo-pagans, a small circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals who flourished from 1908 to 1912. The group honored youth, comradeship, and the simple life and aimed to set aside the constraints of Victorianism. Delany shows how the internal dynamics of the group, not shock of war, led to its disintegration.

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. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 461 pages. This, the final volume of the Clarendon Press edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, contains commentary on the Third Partition, in which Burton considers two especial forms of the disease, Love and Religious Melancholy. The volume includes an index which gives biographical and bibliographical information concerning the more than 1550 authorities cited in the Anatomy, most of whom are little known today. Also included are an index of the major topics discussed in the Anatomy, and a complete bibliography of all the works mentioned in the commentary. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcovers in dust jackets. 737 pages. Index. The dust jackets are faded on the spine. Edited by R.F. Christian. Vol. 1 1828-1879. Vol. 2 1880-1910. In a cardboard slipcase. Clean, bright set.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 341 pages. This is the first collection of essays in seven years by the author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Fiction and the Figures of Life. In it, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. 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, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 95 pages. Sontag's classic essay about the sociology of AIDS, published as an extension of her thoughts about the stigma of illness originally expounded in her book Illness as Metaphor. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Seeley And Co., reprint, 1895, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, 296 pages. B&w frontis portrait with tissue guard. Ex-lib with stamping, bookplate to endpapers, interior clean.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to the spine. "Cary Nelson performs an invaluable service to the reader by recovering the work of dozens of forgotten poets, especially women, blacks, and writers on the left, while making it clear that the texts we recover inevitably gain new meaning from their positioning within contemporary culture." Nicely illustrated in b&w and some color, mostly book jackets and title pages of books discussed. Some light pencil marking in margins.

Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray cloth with black and gilt title block on spine. 224 pages, Introduction by Louis D. Rubin Jr. B&w frontis portrait of participants: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,Merrill Moore, and others. The Fugitive was a poetry magazine published in the 1920s and this is a record of their gathering some 30 years later with their commentaries. Small name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 311 pages. A perceptive visitor's report of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the poorest places in the United States. Profiles the Oglala Sioux living there and along the way a female basketball star. Clean copy.

Softcover. San Francisco, Re/Search Publications0642247, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages, b&w illustrations. 16 cutting-edge performance artists discuss critical questions regarding revolutionary feminism. Contributors include Kathy Acker, Annie Sprinkle, Wanda Coleman, Lydia Lunch, Bell Hooks, others. 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. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 534 pages. In this richly varied selection of Tony Harrison's provocative prose of the last fifty years, the great poet of page, stage and screen presents a lifetime's thinking about art and politics, creativity and mortality. In so doing, he takes us on an extraordinary journey through languages and across continents and millennia, from his Nigerian Lysistrata to the British Raj of his version of Racine's Phedre, to post-Communist Europe for the film Prometheus to a one-off performance of The Kaisers of Carnuntum at the Roman amphitheatre between Vienna and Bratislava, to the peace camp at Greenham Common, and from a Leeds street bonfire celebrating the defeat of Japan by the new atomic bomb to wines made from the vines on volcanoes. Clean copy.

Softcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina , 1st, 1984, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, cream paper covers with red and black titling, 137 pages. There is underlining and notations to text in red ink to about half the pages.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Sun-fading to dust jacket spine, two small closed tears to front cover. Faint foxing to edges, previous owner's signature on front end paper, else a clean, tight copy.