Literature

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 1st, 1899, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth stamped with gilt lettering, 262 pages. Frotis. portrait. A supplemental volume to the two-volume set The Lif and Letters of Benjamin Jowett published in 1897. Name on inside front cover, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 180 pages. The author of the Travis McGee series relates his family's experiences with and high jinx of their pets, two tomcats and a goose. 4 leaves of b&w photo plates. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean 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. Berkeley CA, Bern Porter, 1st, 1945, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. No. 260 out of 750 copies bound for distribution. 157 pages. Tan boards with wear and soiling, gray cloth spine. Shelving information on spine. Front hinge cracked. Ex-library. Printed on various colored paper, with contributions by a lot of well known authors, including Williams, Patchen, Durrell, Lamantia, many others. Edges soiled. Interior very good.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Humanities Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 276 pages. George Lukacs on Appearance and Essence, Erwin Pracht on Socialist Realism, S. Petrov on Realism, Robert Weimann on point of view in fiction, B. G. Zhantieva on Joyce's Ulysses, Werner Mittzenzwei on the Brecht-Lukacs debate, and five other major essays. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 306 pages, b&w photographs. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Previous price sticker on front fly leaf. In this memoir, Morris chronicles the development of his craft, allowing the reader to look inside the man as the creative process takes place. Never forgetting his Midwestern roots, Morris traveled extensively in this country and around the world photographing as he went. This volume is illustrated with many of those photographs and serves as a travelogue that takes us to places like the plains of Nebraska, sultry Mexico, and romantic Venice; Covers slightly bowed. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. JHG Editions/Latitudes Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages plus index. SIGNED BY EDITOR BONAZZI on contents page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages, b&w illustrations. When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immortality--for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. INSCRIBED BY LOVING ("Jerry") on the half-title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper's Magazine Press, BC Ed., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 271 pages. 1st edition, 1st printing with complete number line at the last rear paper of: 74 75 76 77 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. Lacks a price on unclipped jacket so an assumed Book Club Edition. Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. B&w illustrations by Dillard. No markings.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 312 pages. The highlight of Desolation Peak is the journal Kerouac kept, starkly revealing the depth of his poverty, the extremity of his mood swings, and the ongoing arguments with himself over the future direction of his life, his writing, and faith. Along with the journal, he worked on a series of projects, including "Ozone Park," another installment of the Duluoz Legend beginning in 1943, after his discharge from the Navy; "The Martin Family," an intended sequel to The Town and the City, and "Desolation Adventure," a series of sketches that became part 1 of Desolation Angels. In writing it, Kerouac was re-committing himself to his more experimental, then-unpublishable style, declaring in the journal that "the form of the future is no-form." Also included in Collected Writings is "The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing," Kerouac's "transliteration" of the Diamond Sutra, his "Desolation Blues" and "Desolation Pops" poems, and assorted prose sketches and dreams. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon And Schuster, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 253 pages. Thirty-two essays by the New Yorker magazine humorist. Clean copy.

Softcover. University of Toronto Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 264 pages. Two critical discourses central to current Canadian literary theory emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s: post-colonialism as a political paradigm and postmodernism as a literary practice in Canadian and Quebecois fiction. Sylvia Soderlind considers the current debate about the relationship between these two discourses, and proposes a methodology that makes it possible to identify and distinguish between features pertaining to the two. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 540 pages. A comprehensive collection of letters from Jarrell. Edited by his second wife Mary Jarrell with the assistance of Stuart Wright. Jarrell's letters span over fifty years and document his life, thoughts, and writing. The letters are insightful and often humorous, and provide a unique perspective on the author's life and work. Paper covered boards with a cloth spine, dust jacket with mild soil, stain. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon/Bollingen Foundation, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 384 pages. Translated by Mary Hottinger, Tania Stern and James Stern, with introduction by Hermann Broch. Previous seller's price on front fly leaf in crayon, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 404 pages. Reed Whittemore vividly re-creates the complex mix of intensity, humor, anguish, modesty, pride, lustiness, and domesticity that was William Carlos Williams, and gives an admirably focused picture of the turbulent and creative era on which he had such a formative influence. This is a biography of unusual acuteness, energy, and warmth.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd pr., 1945, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn and chipped dust jacket, 247 pages. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR on the title page. Illustrated with 10 b&w plates.

Softcover. Fayetteville AK, University of Arkansas Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 131 pages. Ciardi records his days and nights as a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during four of the last terrible months of World War II. Clean copy.

Softcover. DeKalb IL, Northern Illinois University Press, 1st pbk, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 232 pages. From the time of the first written sacred texts in the West, taboo has proscribed the act and art of translation. So argues the author of this book, exploring the age-old prohibition of translation of sacred texts. Clean copy.

Softcover. Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. 107 pages, b&w engravings by Steven Sorman. Light edge wear to wrappers. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.

Hardcover. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages, b&w photographs. Light foxing to top edge. Else a clean, tight copy.

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.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2014-09-22, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 765 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. 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. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 276 pages. Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 319 pages, several b&w woodcut illustrations. Black cloth spine with marbled boards, top edge gilt. Minor corner wear.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press , 1st, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 292 pages. Light edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 468 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Green endpapers. Tan cloth cover boards, red title on spine. Pages clean, spine straight, binding tight. Excellent condition.

Hardcover. New York, Viking, 1st thus, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 135 pages. Previous owners name at top right edge of front endpaper. Minor foxing to preliminary pages. Maroon cloth covers with narrow section of fade at top edge of front cover. Dust jacket with edgewear, light chipping and tiny holes along folds - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Night Shade Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 439 pages. Hardcover with facsimile copy of handwritten letters to endpapers. Black cloth covered boards with iridescent titles to cover & spine. Frontispiece illustration of H. P. Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei in black & white. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Tight binding, sharp corners, clean & unmarked pages.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st US, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 206 pages, with b&w illustrations. Very clean and tight copy. Remainder line bottom edge, otherwise unmarked.

Hardcover. NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt. 192 pages, illustrated endpapers. Tarkington's letters written and illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches in 1903 and 1904 from Europe addressed to his three nephews. Clean copy, no dust jacket.

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.

Softcover. University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 320 pages. Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Tanning to rear endpapers otherwise clean, very good in an unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 374 pages.Translated by Joan Pinkham, notes, bibliography, index, b/w photo plates, white boards/black cloth. Originally published Librairie Flammarion, Paris, 1988. First American Edition.

Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers, 1st US, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt stamping. 249 pages plus publisher's ads Candid opinions, in a series of essays on literature, music, fashion and character by the author of "John Halifax Gentleman". 'If I say somewhat hard things, I beg my readers to believe me that it is not out of a hard heart, careless of giving pain, but a sad heart, knowing pain must be given.' (Preliminary.) Uncommon. Mild spotting to covers otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan--all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, ZE Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with white lettering. No dust jacket issued. With Stay, acclaimed poet, artist, and bestselling memoirist Nick Flynn presents a self-portrait via a constellation of topics that have circled his work. Ranging from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships, Stay is a mixed-media retrospective that shows nothing is created in isolation. Mirroring Flynn's life, this work of visual and literary memoir is populated by examples of his collaborations since the 1980s with such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, filmmaker Paul Weitz, and artists John Baldessari, Marilyn Minter, and Bill Shuck. In Flynn's refusal to conform to narrative or the safety of his own perspective, Stay grasps for an essential truth, an answer to what art, in the end, can and cannot reflect. Illustrated in color, b&w.

Softcover. Sarasota FL, Pineapple Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages. Follow Ernest Hemingway's exploits on the Bahamian island of Bimini from 1935 to 1937, the very moment in time when the International Game Fish Association (under the author's co-leadership) was emerging. Covers Hemingway's role in the formation of the IGFA, his underappreciated seminal writing about competitive saltwater angling when the sport was still in its infancy, the amazing fishing he enjoyed on the island, and the way all of these experiences translated into the composition of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. This is the only book on this period in Hemingway's life and reveals unexpected dimensions to the Hemingway portrait that deserve attention, including his surprising humor, his advanced conservationist views several decades before the environmental movement even began, and his egalitarian ideas about his contemporary female counterparts in the big-game fishing world--challenging the usual portrait of Hemingway as a chauvinist with no personal rules, boundaries, or conscience. Includes beautiful vintage photographs of 1930s Bimini that have never been published in book form.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset and Dunlap, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A collection of essays, most previously appearing in Pageant, The New York Time, The New Republic and other publications in the 1960s. Subjects include Madison Avenue Foreign Policy, The Strange Case of Negro Superiority, Margaret Mead for President, A Solution for Leisure, among many others.

Hardcover. NY, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with silver lettering, price-clipped dust jacket worn with large chunk gone from bottom 2" of spine and rear panel. The recollections of the author of a French photography sortie carried out a 33,000' in defiance of the German fighter planes during May 1940. Illustrated Bernard Lamotte. No indication of printing, illustrated endpapers. No date on title page, Copyright page states 1942. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st BC Ed., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt titles, 687 pages, b&w photos. Has the A_3.69 (C), small embossed circle at bottom of rear cover indicating a book club printing. Bright, clean copy, missing the dust jacket.

Hardcover. Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glossy pictorial boards, 374 pages. This new biography of Ian Fleming presents a fresh and illuminating portrayal of the iconic creator of James Bond. Oliver Buckton provides the first in-depth exploration of the entire process of Ian Fleming's writing--from initial conception, through composition, to his involvement in the innovative publication methods of his books. He also investigates the vital impact of Fleming's work in naval intelligence during World War Two on his later writings, especially the wartime operations he planned and executed and how they drove the plots of the James Bond novels. Buckton considers the vital role of wartime deception, disinformation, and propaganda in shaping Fleming's later techniques and imaginative creations. Offering a radically new view of Fleming's relationships with women, Buckton traces the role of strong, independent, and intelligent women such as Maud Russell, Phyllis Bottome, and his wife, Ann, on Fleming's portrayal of female characters. The book concludes with a thorough analysis of the James Bond films from Eon productions, and their influence in promoting, while also distorting, the public's recognition of Fleming's writing. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, The Art Union of London, 1st thus, 1851, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, half-leather, maroon calf over maroon boards with gllt rules, spine with gilt decorated raised bands and lettering. Portrait frontispiece by J[ohn] Gilbert after Sir Joshua Reynolds. 14 pages of Goldsmith's verse followed by 30 plates engraved on wood by J.Thompson, W.T.Green, J.W.Whymper, G.Dalziel, E.Dalziel, &c. after the designs of C.Stanfield, J.Leech, E.H.Corbould, W.L.Leitch, E.M.Ward & others. Some cloth fade to covers, front fly leaf gone, bookplate on inside front cover. Mild foxing.

Hardcover. Boston, D.C. Heath & Co., 1st, 1912, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 12mo. 193 pages, beige pictorial paper covered boards, maroon cloth spine, gilt lettering on spine, Folding plate in front. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages. Cultures of United States Imperialism represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the United States. Light shelf wear.

Softcover. Prospect Heights IL, Waveland Press, Revised Ed., 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 280 pages. An account of a massive earthquake in the small city of Yungay, Peru in 1970. The author lived in the area and documents the survivors efforts to rebuild. Clean copy.