Literature

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, 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. 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. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with sunning to spine, 237 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front fly leaf. Herbert offers a fresh perspective on Melville's Typee by considering it in the context of his encounters with the natives (including being held captive for a time) in the Marquesan Islands. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Applause, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 896 pages. A facsimile edition of the original 1623 publication of the bard's works. Recounts the background of the first folio, the earliest and most authoritative collection of Shakespeare's thirty-six plays.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.

Hardcover. NY, Philosophical Library, 1st US, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers, 265 pages. B&w frontis. portrait. Previous owner's long inscription on front fly-leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 663 pages. Clean copy. Edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel. This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

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.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 248 pages. Errata slip laid in. Name on blank prelim pages. Otherwise clea.

NY, Coward-McCann, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt title on spine, 383 pages. INSCRIBED BY ROREM on front fly leaf. Clean copy, lacks dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 512 pages, b&w illustrations. Penelope Fitzgerald was a great English writer whose career didn't begin until she was nearly sixty. She would go on to win some of the most coveted awards in literature--the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in an impeccable match of talent between biographer and subject, Hermione Lee, a master biographer and one of Fitzgerald's greatest champions, gives us this remarkable writer's story. Lee's critical expertise is on dazzling display on every page, as it illuminates this extraordinary English life. Fitzgerald, born into an accomplished intellectual family, the granddaughter of two bishops, led a life marked by dramatic twists of fate, moving from a bishop's palace to a sinking houseboat to a last, late blaze of renown. We see Fitzgerald's very English childhood in the village of Hampstead; her Oxford years, when she was known as the "blonde bombshell"; her impoverished adulthood as a struggling wife, mother and schoolteacher, raising a family in difficult circumstances; and the long-delayed start to her literary career.

NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket with light tanning to spine. A study and interpretation of Yeats' five plays and related lyrics. Includes notes, bibliography & index.

Hardcover. NY, Dial Books, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 300 pages, b&w illustrations. The children's book author has won the Newberry Medal and National Book Award. Now in these fascinating stories from her life, she reveal the origins of her book characters from events in her life; from China with missionary parents to single life in Japan to life in Maryland with four children. Filled with personal photos and letters. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. First edition of this collection of pieces penned in the first half of the 1970s, by four-time Pulitzer nominee. Included are reflections on man and nature in rural Georgia ("Travels in Georgia"), a profile of an Arkansas horseman hoping to make it big in an important horse race ("Ruidoso"), a quest to discover the true location that inspired the "Marvin Gardens" square in the Monopoly game, ("In Search of Marvin Gardens"), and more. Very bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 391 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on half title page and SIGNED again on title page. The first biography of the writer/naturalist, and one of the leading founders of the modern environmental movement, Henry Beston. Scholar Daniel Payne-granted unrestricted access to the writer's archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family-has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages, a facsimile reprint of his fantastic tales first published in 1785. Horatio Walpole, also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. His literary reputation rests on his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. "The Hieroglyphic Tales were undoubtedly written a little before the creation of the world, and have ever since been preserved, by oral tradition, in the mountains of Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet discovered. Of these few facts we could have the most authentic attestations of several clergymen, who remember to have heard them repeated by old men long before they, the said clergymen, were born." (From Walpole's own ntroduction). Clean copy.

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. Cleveland, World Publishing, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, mild soil to rear panel. In-depth biography of the author most well known for 'The Wind In The Willows', which also includes extensive information on the societal changes of the time. 399 pages with Index, Bibliography, and Notes, 6" X 8-3/4", several black and white photos through the text. There is small discard stamp on front fly leaf, no other markings.

Softcover. Santa Rosa CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st pbk, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 340 pages. The majority of the letters in this collection pertain to Reznikoff's personal life, addressed chiefly to his wife, Marie Syrkin, and his lifelong friend and sometime employer in Hollywood, Albert Lewin.

Hardcover. NY, Canongate, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. A re-telling of the story of Odysseus, with his wife Penelope and her twelve maids narrating from their viewpoint and with their insights. Previous owner's inscription on half-title page, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame and long, inexorable decline of Delmore Schwartz, a complex and deeply troubled man who was keenly aware of his own inner contradictions, as revealed by his correspondence. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Novelist and critic Colm Toibin provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work. Colm Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Clean copy.

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.

Softcover. NY, Bellevue Literary Press, 1st, 2007, Softcover, 236 pages. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys from Russia to Italy to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. 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. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons."

Hardcover. Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1883, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Copyright Edition, Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1883, 312 pages, illuminated vellum binding, with front-edge flaps, leather stitching, 6.5 x 4.5", beautiful binding reminiscent of Medieval manuscripts with latticed cords and illuminated initial. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket with short closed tears. 14 original and thoughtful interviews - Burroughs discusses Paris in the 50s, the Olympia Press and the issue of obscenity, Norman Mailer on the Jack Abbott issue, Paul Theroux on Americans abroad, Scott Spencer on the experience of having a movie made from his book 'Endless Love' and more. Biographical information and photographs of each author. 324 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 302 pages. Celebrated Author Roger Angell has warmly Inscribed to an friend and signed on the title page ("For Carl - All best, Roger Angell ". The book contains the childhood baseball recollections from America's premier observer of the world of baseball and life. Angell was the long time contributor to The New Yorker. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 306 pages. Morse Peckham "considers the various roles played by pornography, especially within that hateful siege of contraries which constitutes stability and innovation." Chapters: What is Pornography?, The Art in Pornography, An Explanation for Pornography, Pornography and Culture.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, reprint, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn and lightly soiled dust jacket, unclipped with $4.50 price. Essays on a wide range of topics, including the assassination of Gandhi, Vassar, anti-Semitism, the Communist party, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, etc. No first printing indicated so assumed 2nd pr. No markings.

Hardcover. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly rubbed dust jacket, 290 pages. These brief essays appeared in a regular column that Rexroth did for The Saturday Review of Literature. The subjects include many of the standard classic texts from world literature, i.e., Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gibbon, Whitman, Tolstoy, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 516 pages. A biography of a brilliant literary figure, a poet, critic, political and social reformer of mid-nineteenth century America. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 177 pages. In this edition of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments and other writings, Richard Bellamy draws on recent Italian scholarship to show how Beccaria wove together the various political languages of the Enlightenment into a political philosophy that combines republican, contractarian, romantic and liberal as well as utilitarian themes. This edition also includes a number of pieces from Beccaria's writings on political economy and the history of civilization that were not previously available in English. Clean copy.