Literature

Softcover. London, Between the Lines, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages. A 17,000 word interview, with a career sketch, a comprehensive bibliography, and a representative list of quotations from Heaney's critics and reviewers. Also included is Heaney's poem, 'Known World'. Spine faded, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 346 pages. An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 146 pages. Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with light tape repairs, 318 pages. Stated First Edition. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 2nd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 221 pages plus index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 594 pages. A landmark in postwar American literary criticism, forty-one extended essays on contemporary poets, including Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, and James Merrill. Blending biography, textual analysis, and philosophical reflection, it defined a generation's poetic discourse. The book stands as both a map of mid-century American verse and a statement of Howard's erudite critical voice. Light shelfwear, fraying to top, bottom of dust jacket spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust jacket with light wear, 408 pages. The circumstances surrounding Montaigne's writings are described in a review of his life and important personal relationships. Gutter crack after front fly leaf. A sound, clean copy.

Softcover. Munich, self-published, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 80 pages, bound in stiff paper wrappers illustrated by Edward Gorey. In an age-toned glassine wrapper. The paper spine has separated from the binding but sound and very repairable. Limited to 300 copies, this copy INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR to Nora and Roger(Roger Shattuck, literary historian and critic, and his wife).

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. New York, Knopf, Reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 129 pages. Color illustrations by James McMullan. Dust jacket unclipped with slight rubbing. Otherwise, clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Holiday House, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 152 pages. Hardcover with black & white illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket with closed tears to front cover. Protected by mylar cover. Clean, tight copy. History of this children's book publishing house followed by chronological listing of all their publications.

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

Hardcover. New York, Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 221 pages. Top edge stained red. Light wear to pictorial dust jacket, else a very neat, tight copy.

Hardcover. Paris, J. Hetzel, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 636 pages. Hardcover. French text only. Previous owners name at top left corner of preliminary page dated 1868. Gilt title and decorations on red leather spine with embossed pebbled cloth covers. Satirical black & white illustrations by Jean-Jacques Grandville. Marbled endpapers. All edges gilt. Light rubbing to cover edges and spine. Small area of discoloration on lower section of front cover. Clean, bright pages.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 1892, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 260 pages. Gilt top edge. Light edge wear, rubbing to covers. Bookplate inside front cover. Else a clean, tight copy.

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

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Carey, Lea & Carey, Second series, 1829, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Vol 1: 296 pages. Vol 2: 286 pagesHardcovers. Brown boards, paste down title on spine in black. Original owner inscription on front flyleaf of both books, original owner's signature on back pages. Pages untrimmed, rough edged, tanning and foxing to pages. Binding very good, spine straight. Agewear throughout, in very good condition for its age. Good solid volumes of Sir Walter Scott's tales as told to his grandson.

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. New York, Doubleday, 1t, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Color illustrations throughout.

Softcover. St. Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st wraps, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, SIGNED BY NOVAKOVICH on title-page.

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. NY, Viking, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that he has today--far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professional crisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales. Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language. INSCRIBED BY STROHM on the title page.

Softcover. London, Routledge, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes. In examining the cultural apparatus surrounding it, Grixti argues that such narratives raise important questions about the relationship between fiction and society. Clean copy.

Softcover. Paris, Sotheby's, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages, color plates throughout. FRENCH TEXT. Sotheby's catalog for Sale No. PF7014 held in Paris on November 29, 2007. 298 lots. Illustrated in color. Text in French.. The volume is in perfect, pristine condition; unmarked, tight, square, and clean.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 572 pages. The author as written an admirable book that pulls no punches in recounting Hellman and Hammett's flaboyant lives and compulsions. like new in a protective brodart.

Hardcover. Gale Group, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 196 pages, b&w illustrations. A scholarly examination of Camus and his work. Like new, 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.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 184 pages. Saving the Text cuts through Jacques Derrida's complex blend of philosophy, commentary, and elaborate wordplay to ascertain his place in the history of criticism and the significance of Glas as a literary event. Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey Hartman explores the usefulness of Derrida's style of close reading for English and American scholarship and establishes its relevance to the division that has arisen between European and Anglo-American critical approaches.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket that is taped to covers, 554 pages. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.

University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press , 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Weintraub's compilation of Shaw's diaries reveal the day to day life of one of Britain's most famous playwrights. 558 pages. Vol. 1 only of a two volume set. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 2nd pr., 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Whitman's genius, passions, poetry, and androgynous sensibility entwined to create an exuberant life amid the turbulent American mid-nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Kaplan examines the mysterious selves of the enigmatic man who celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual and sang the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Grove Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 239 pages. Hettie Jones presents an intimate memoir of her life--from her middle-class Jewish family in Queens to her marriage to the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones and her search for her own artistic voice. Clean copy.

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. Pierre SD, South Dakota Historical Society Press, 1st, 2114, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Hidden away since the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder s never-before-published autobiography reveals the true stories of her pioneering life. Some of her experiences will be familiar; some will be a surprise. Pioneer Girl re-introduces readers to the woman who defined the pioneer experience for millions of people around the world. Through her recollections, Wilder details the Ingalls family s journey from Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, back to Minnesota, and on to Dakota Territory sixteen years of travels, unforgettable stories, and the everyday people who became immortal through her fiction. Using additional manuscripts, diaries, and letters, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography builds on Wilder s work by adding valuable context and explores her growth as a writer. Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, David R. Godine, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 368 pages. Eagerly exchanging an existence of idle privilege and social intrigue for one of hard work and literary distinction, Origo led a life characterized by vitality and commitment. Born in 1902 into a wealthy American family, she and her British mother permanently left the U.S. after the untimely death of her father in 1910. Traveling extensively throughout Europe, they eventually settled outside of Florence, becoming prominent members of the stuffy Anglo-Florentine community of expatriates. Asserting her trademark independence, she married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of a cavalry officer-sculptor. Together Antonio and Iris purchased and totally revitalized an arid Tuscan valley and renovated a crumbling estate. With virtually no experience and few practical skills, they transformed themselves into agrarian pioneers and their extensive acreage into a prosperous working community supporting more than 200 people. During the war years, they quietly supported the Allies, offering refuge to countless numbers of partisans and prisoners of war. In addition to these accomplishments, Iris also buried one child and raised two more, conducted several heart-wrenching extramarital affairs, and distinguished herself as both a biographer and a literary critic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 166 pages. Pindar (c. 518-438 B.C.), one of ancient Greece's most famous lyric poets, is perhaps best known for his victory (epinicean) odes, written to honor the winners at various sets of games, such as the Olympiad. In Crown of Song, Deborah Steiner's study of these odes, she writes "If Pindar is remote from us in genre, his style strikes the reader as vivid and immediate. And in my reading of the epinicean odes, it is the poet's use of metaphor that accounts for the dynamic quality of his verse." Steiner begins her analysis by exploring both ancient and modern theories of metaphor, and then turns to specific imagery employed by the poet--plant life, athletics, minerals and numerous others--as a way of understanding how these metaphoric complexes function in the poet's praise of the victor, his assertion of his own place as perpetuator of the victor's immortal fame, and in his vision of human achievement and glory in the context of mortal life and immortal gods. Written in a lively, readable style, Crown of Song opens up the sometimes difficult verse of this celebrated ancient poet to modern readers. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

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

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth lettered in gilt at the spine. Illustrated with eight photographic plates. 422 pages. Extended passages from Jefferies' work, with a general introduction in two parts: 'The English Genius' and 'To the Two Types of Jefferies Readers', introductions to each section, notes on the text, and the Epigraph. No dust jacket, clean copy.

Softcover. Santa Cruz CA, Kayak Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, tan wrappers with paper label on front, 48 pages. Pictures by Douglas McClellan. An uncommon experimental work, 1000 copies printed.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. A young English novelist's journey through the Soviet Union in the early sixties (author also wrote "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner', "The General", and others. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Free Press, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 330 pages. This book traces the central developments in American literature between and 1919. It opens with an account of the consolidation of realism as the dominant standard of critical value and brings the reader forward to the moment, at the end of World War I, when American writers began to take a recognized place among the masters of literary modernism. The ascendancy of the novel as the principal genre of the realists is presented against a broader cultural and historical background. Professor Berthoff reviews and evaluates American fiction from the time when Howells, Twain, and Henry James were still under attack by old-school idealizers, to the emergence of a new critical and testamentary realism with Crane, Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein. Clean copy.

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 1-258. Articles include: The tragedy of Bert Williams, mystery writer John D. MacDonald, Edward R. Murrow's WW2 radio broadcasts, the dance marathon craze, Spider-Man - Superhero in the Liberal Tradition, others. Clean.

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.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 269 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, The Viking Press, 2nd pr., 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. Clean, tight copy.