Literature

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages. A fascinating figure of English literary and political history, Radclyffe Hall was born in 1880 in Bournemouth, England. Hall suffered through an exceedingly unhappy childhood until her father's death. With her inheritance, Hall leased a house in Kensington and began to live the way she pleased. She started dressing in chappish clothes, called herself Peter, then John, and wrote her first collection of verse. She was a political reactionary, a reformed Catholic, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, fussy about food and obsessive about work. She got her pipes from Dunhill's, wore brocade smoking jackets, spats in winter, and had her hair cropped off at the barber's. Hall is most famous today for her book, The Well of Loneliness, which she wrote in 1928. A novel about lesbian love, the book caused an enormous scandal on its publication and it was suppressed both in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where Hall was put on trial under the Obscene Publications Act.

Hardcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 3rd Ed., 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Five volumes complete, 594, 576, 543. 645 and 593 pages. Olive cloth binding with gilt lettering on spine, top edge gilt.Couple hinges tender. Bright, clean set. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

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

Softcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 387 pages. Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, A Local Habitation and a Name examines the unstable dialectic of "reality" and "imagination," as well as of "history" and "literature." Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Mild damp wrinkle to bottom corner of first 10 pages, otherwise very good, clean.

Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 402 pages. "Miss Lang focuses on the content of Pa Chin novels and short stories, which vividly describe the life of Chinese youth. She also pays great attention to the western, particularly Russian and French, influences on his political philosophy."

Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 524 pages. The finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage by V.S. Naipaul - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume spanning some forty years of travel and sustained meditations on our world. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Constable, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, blue cloth covers with silver titles. 354 pages. b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 274 pages, with b&w photographs. Very clean and tight copy. Unauthorized biography of Hunter Thompson. Perry takes us on a journey through Thompson's booze and drug fueled rise to fame. From a young yahoo in Louisville, Kentucky-drinking heavily and playing with his rifle, to the first hand secrets of Thompson's inventive and irreverent gonzo jounralism. A look at a man who was a horror to some, a hero to others.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 541 pages. It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Frederick Ungar, 1st thus, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 263 pages. 1st American Edition of this Abridged Translation. This is Kraus's masterpiece, with half of Europe as its stage. It is presented here in English for the first time, in an abridged version that preserves the essence of the 800-page original. Its influence on Brecht, Ionesco, and other playwrights is acknowledged. Mingling actual quotations, news reports, and government orders with Kraus's own satiric dialogue, this immense drama (never meaning to be performed) offers a vast fresco of events at the front and at home during, as it prophesied, the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, Kraus anticipated the development of atomic warfare and its threat to all mankind. Some of Kraus is untranslatable, but, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review, "Ungar has done us a benefit at least by bringing us a bit closer to this sharp-eyed, angry, prickly, lover-hater of mankind." INSCRIBED BY FREDERICK UNGAR, the editor and publisher on the half-title page. He also wrote the 14 page introduction. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped, lightly worn dust jacket. "Living by Fiction" is written for people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Pynchon, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Dillard shows why fiction matters. Mild soil, edgewear to dj.

Hardcover. Santa Barbara CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 59 pages. Edition of 750 copies. This is one of the unsigned copies. Quarter black cloth with paper title label. Printed boards. Acetate dust jacket with light soil.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Two hardcover volumes in worn, soiled dust jackets. Dark green cloth covers with gilt titles to upper covers and spines. As a result of djs, both volumes are bright and clean, 261. 243 pages. No markings.

Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 2nd pr., 1947, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in light tan cloth with red lettering to the spine, 361 pages. Although the life of London runs like a thread through the whole fabric of this book, it is not essentially a book about London. Life in Bloomsbury is but the center of a large circle, the point around which the rest of the book revolves, the origin of a disarming commentary on an infinite variety of topics - on Bloomsbury's squares, on the picturesqueness of London a generation ago, on what is true Cockney, on the differences of English and American humor, on the decay of English wit, on books and authors and publishers and the Press, on the literary lions of the past, on the religion of speed, on the charm of Americans, on how the Victorian age was neither so repressed nor so hidebound as most people today like to believe - and so on, one thing leading to another, like good conversation at a good luncheon overlooking the mellow squares of Bloomsbury. The book is full, too, of good stories and reminiscences, both humorous and pathetic, but there is shrewd comment besides on the deficiencies of contemporary society, not the less effective because the author knows how to soften the blow. Mild soil, sunning to covers, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 164 pages. An autobiographical memoir, set for the most part in London in the 1940s and 50s, by the author of "At the Jerusalem", "Trespasses" and "An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne". It is composed of fifty scenes or fragments of memory which describe Bailey's parents, relatives, friends and acquaintances as he was growing up fatherless in working class Batterseas. Remainder line bottom edge.

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.

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. New York, Random House, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 255 pages. A very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Julian Messner, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. A memoir by the Chinese American author of many distinguished children's books. No dust-jacket issued. B&w photos, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hawthorn Books, 3rd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 279 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. Burlington, VT, Ashgate , 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 232 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

Softcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st pbk, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 123 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. Oversize hardcover art book. This is the first publication of the complete body of noted Polish Author and artist Schulz's known artwork. A great engraver-draftsman, Schulz earned his living as a menial art teacher. He was one of the first Modern writers to incorporate his own drawings in his stories, one of which, "The Age of Genius", is about his artistic childhood. "His art, like his writing, is deeply infused with a sense of personal and cultural degradation, an ominous, prescient aura of the horrors in store for the fragile and rapidly disappearing world in which he lived.

Hardcover. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 535 pages. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket has edgewear.

Hardcover. Lanham MD, Lyons Press , 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 300 pages. James M. Cain was among the prominent member of the "hard-boiled" school of writing that characterized the 1930s and 1940s, one of the masters of the genre that included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His novels became such popular film noir classics as The Postman always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce, and his 1937 novel Serenade boldly portrayed its hero as a bisexual. Cain also taught journalism at various colleges in Maryland, wrote editorials for the New York World, and was for a brief time managing editor at The New Yorker. This is the first biography of James M. Cain written with the full cooperation of the late novelist's family.

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

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1s, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Light green cloth, lettered and bordered in gilt, top text block edge in gilt. Illustrated with black and white photographic plates by Clifton Johnson. Light shelf wear, bookplate on inside front cover with black marking. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Fug You is Ed Sanders's unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of "total assault on the culture," to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs. Fug You traces the flowering years of New York's downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground's scrutiny, and leading to Sanders's arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs -- formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called "the world's oldest living hippie" by Allen Ginsberg) -- as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Athens GA, University Of Georgia Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages. Caroline Ferguson Gordon (1895-1981) was a notable American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1934 O. Henry Award . Offers the most complete and accurate portrait to date of the writer. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd pr., 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his sympathy for the Okies fleeing the dust storms of the Midwest, the migrant workers toiling in California's fields and the labourers on Cannery Row, reflecting a social engagement-paradoxical for all of his natural misanthropy-radically different from the writers of the so-called Lost Generation. 446 pages, remainder dot on top edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Columbia MO, University of Missouri, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun's experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available. Hamsun's feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings--directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland.

Softcover. Washington, Library of Congress, 1st thus, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages, illustrations in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Cudahy, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Small chip to bottom of spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Charles E. Goodspeed, 1st, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 71 pages, number 410 of a 500. French hand-made paper, printed by D. B. Updike at the Merrymount Press. Illustrated with one plate and two facsimiles of Thoreau's journal. Gray-green boards with a beige cloth spine with a paper label. Spine and covers darkening, light shelf wear.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 249 pages. Light edgewear and tanning to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Richmond VA, Dietz Press, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 87 pages. Frontispiece of author, foreword by Davd Jackson.

Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 178 pages. Dust jacket slightly worn and with short tears. Some foxing on endpages, top edge stained red.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 464 pages, b&w photographs. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy. This biography offers the most complete and accurate portrait to date of the writer Caroline Gordon (1895-1981). Viewing Gordon's life in the context of female literary tradition, Nancylee Novell Jonza reclaims Gordon's integrity, individuality, and artistic vision from beneath a self-effacing, sometimes detractive, public image carefully fostered by the artist herself. Gordon's nine novels and three short-story collections are a major contribution in their own right to the southern literary renaissance. Despite an enduring readership, however, she still remains in the shadow of her husband, Allen Tate, the Fugitive Poet and Agrarian critic, partially due to her contrived persona of a traditional southern lady turned artist under the tutelage of a gifted, benevolent male writer. Drawing on manuscript drafts, unpublished works, letters, and a significant body of her journalistic writing, Jonza investigates fully the causes and effects of Gordon's self-mythologizing and covers substantially more ground than the thirty years during which she was closest to Tate.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. No dust jacket. 384 pages, b&w illustrations. The biography of an influential critic gives a vivid picture of American cultural life from the 1880s to the 1920s. INSCRIBED BY ERIK HUNEKER, SON OF JAMES on the front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton & Company, 1st, 1852, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with black title to front board and to spine. 261 pages, publisher's ads. Contains of an early review of Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as accounts of travels to the Nubian Desert and Arctic, a history of Spanish literature, and literary essays and reviews of works by Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. Mild foxing, some light chipping and wear to spine.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 247 pages. Selected and edited by Carl R. Proffer. Translated by Carl R. Proffer in collaboration with Vera Krivoshein. From the five volumes of correspondence in Gogol's collected works Carl Proffer, a teacher and translator of Russian, has fashioned this scholarly one-volume edition, adding his own exceptionally informative footnotes and an eight-page bibliography. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Surrey UK, Ashgate Publishing, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 165 pages. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. B&w, color illustrations.

Softcover. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 287 pages. Because Naipaul's work occupies such an important place in English literature today, it is necessary to understand the forces that shape his work and the issues with which he is concerned. If this study raises some of the more important questions about Naipaul's work and demonstrates that is cannot be seen as an unproblematic guide to post colonial "reality," then it would have gone a long way toward opening up the terrain in which the most meaningful discussion of his work can take place. Like it or not, Naipaul's work represents an important postcolonial impulse/response that begs to be understood and interpreted. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with gilt and black title on spine, 353 pages. WITH THE AUTHOR'S INSCRIPTION pasted to front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets. 406, 327 pages. Hobbes translated the Homeric poems into English verse during the course of the 1670s, when he was already well into his eighties. These texts constitute his most extensive single undertaking as well as his last major work. Editor Eric Nelson also offers a detailed analysis of the translations themselves, identifying the numerous instances in which Hobbes rewrites the poems in order to bring them into alignment with hisviews on politics, rhetoric, aesthetics, and theology. Hobbes's Iliads and Odysses of Homer, Nelson suggests, should be regarded as a continuation of Leviathan by other means. Clean, like-new. DUE TO WEIGHT DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover,48 pages. The Augustan Reprint Society Number 230. Orig. tan card wrappers, stapled binding. Two 18th century poems dealing with the working class of the time. Clean copy.