Novels

Hardcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, reprint, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 479 pages. Predestined, Whitman's first and most successful novel, is a remarkably con-trolled, inexorably plotted story of Felix Piers, born to wealth and misfortune, who was predestined to a life of failure. The rich, varied background of New York City's many sides provides the compelling backdrop to this deterministic novel. First published in 1910, one of the titles in the Lost American Fiction Series. The author is an over-looked American literary naturalist whose Predestined compares favorably with the work of Frank Norris. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1913, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering, 396 pages. 'The Heart of the Hills' is the last novel completed by John Fox Jr. and the final piece in his mountain trilogy. This companion to The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is crucial to an understanding of Fox's views. He believed mountain people were exploited by outside industrialists. Frontis plate plus six more all by artist F. C. Yohn. Very bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 274 pages, in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Like new and SIGNED BY MICHAELS at the 2003 Breadloaf Writer's Conference.

Hardcover. NY, Limited Editions CLub, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in forest-green cloth, spine stamped in gilt with printed label attached. Introduction by Norman H. Strouse with color and b&w illustrations by Lynton Lamb. Copy #794 of 1500 SIGNED by the illustrator on the colophon page. Wells felt that this was his best novel. Very good in a bright yellow slipcase with some darkening to one area.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, green cloth with dark blue lettering, decoration in a bright dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 366 pages. Rear dj lists to Wild Horse Mesa. Name on front fly leaf in pencil, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd pr., 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 328 pages. Unclipped dust jacket protected by mylar cover with the flaps glued to cover. Won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a best first novel in 1988

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Co., 2nd pr., 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth lettered in white, front cover designed in dark blue, red & white. Frontispiece and 5 inserted plates in b&w by W.J. Aylward. Top edge gilt. This is what is considered the second state, with the spine lettered in white; the first state has gilt lettering on the spine. A thrilling epic of a sea voyage and a complex novel of ideas, The Sea-Wolf is a standard-bearer of its genre. It is the vivid story of a gentleman scholar, Humphrey Van Weyden, who is rescued by a seal-hunting schooner after a ferryboat accident in San Francisco Bay. The Sea-Wolf also introduces Jack London's most memorable, fully realized character, Wolf Larsen, the schooner's brutal captain, who ruthlessly crushes anyone standing in his way. An immediate bestseller, the first printing of forty thousand copies was sold out before publication. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean. Small, short tear to spinr cloth.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd pr., 1934, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 428 pages. "Published June 6, 1934 First and Second Printings before Publication" on copyright page. Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. The first volume in Mann's great tetralogy, telling the story of the Biblical Joseph's rise as a statesman in Egypt, his conduct during the epic famine, and his restoration to his father Jacob. Bookplate on inside front cover, small notation on rear dj flap, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Folio Society, 1st thus, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, original gilt-blocked decorated dark green cloth in slipcase. 172 pages, illustrated with wood engravings by Peter Reddick. Introduction by Angela Thirlwell. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Clean, fresh copy.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Nominated for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan's employer, T.-the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream-who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous descent into strange and unpredictable terrain. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, reprint, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 320 pages. A brilliant, action-packed re-imagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. Copyright pages states First Edition with the number 10 above it, so a later printing. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, brown cloth with black lettering on spine and front cover, dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 377 pages. Dust jacket art and four b&w illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner. Bottom quarter of spine gone, short blue mark to front fly leaf, otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. First edition, 1st printing, of this famed Hannibal Lecter & Clarice Starling thriller, later made into the movie starring Jodi Foster and Anthony Hopkins. Dust jacket with minor edgewear, clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd Ed., 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover on a worn and tape-repaired dust jacket. A nice copy of the 2nd edited version of Billy Budd, a Melville tale unfinished at the time of his death and left in a rough, unassembled condition. Its first publication was considered rushed and this 2nd version was much more painstakingly edited, and bears much editorial discussion and includes the first publication of the short story on which the novel was based. Book is very good, clean. The dj not so much.

Hardcover. London, The Folio Society, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown patterned cloth with gilt lettering to spine, in slipcase. Maya Angelou's autobiographical account of her childhood and early youth growing up in 1930's America, is an evocation of a black girl's struggle against her oppressors. A great American classic, Maya Angelou's powerful and perceptive memoir forged a path for Black American women's writing and made her an international icon. Written in 1969, it recounts her early experiences as a woman of color in the segregated Deep South where, surrounded by bigotry and poverty, daily life was lived on a knife-edge.

Hardcover. NY, The Dial Press, 2nd pr., 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 270 pages, very good in a rubbed dust jacket with light edgewear. Mailer's fourth novel and seventh book describes thirty-two hours in the life of college professor and war hero Stephen Rojack during a 1960s existential journey on Manhattan's East Side.

Hardcover. NY, Phoenix Press, 1st, 1942, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with light edge wear. A pulp romance from World War II about an office love affair. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 181 pages. First appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker. The traditional tale retold. In a series of short chapters the captious heroine is obliquely revealed as a woman regularly pleasured in a shower cubicle by the seven dwarves for whom she performs 'horsewifely' duties; the prince is a fop, and the stepmother is almost an incidental presence in relation to the potently amoral Hogo (one of several 'introduced' characters to the fable). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Bristol, England, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1st Edition, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 310 pages. Hardcover. Arrowsmith's 3/6 Series, Vol. XVIII. Hand-written letter from author [dated 27th Febry. /(18)95] laid in and attached to front flyleaf. In the letter, Hope mentions another book in comparison to this volume. Date of publication not indicated within, but correspondence accompanying and mentioning volume is dated 1895. Spine slightly cocked. Deep maroon cloth, gilt title on spine(slightly faded) and front cover board (still bright), boards have some rubbing, agewear, very light fraying at corners of boards, spine has chipping to top and bottom. Pages and edges have tanning from age. Some chipping to hinges of front and back endpapers, binding not affected. In very good condition.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st US, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 287 pages. Translated from the Russian by Gordon Clough. A novel by the author of The Yawning Heights. A Professor in Moscow slowly realises that Communism isn't all it's cracked up to be. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Overlook Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY KESSLER on the title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 185 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 161 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st UK, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Ever After is a rumination on death, faith, and finding meaning in life more than a proper novel. The narrator, Bill Unwin, is recovering from a failed suicide. His convalescence is used to muse over the fate of the father he never knew, and who may not even have been his father, and the ravings of his hedonistic mother over the vanity of posterity. Meanwhile, he is withholding the manuscript of one of his Victorian ancestors from a fellow Cambridge don, a vain, publicity-seeking but successful rival. This is finally the motive for a second, parallel plot, in many ways the more interesting, about the Victorian in forebear in question, Matthew Pearce. For Pearce, surveyor, amateur fossil-collector, and son-in-law to the local parson, is a man of his age, scientifically inclined yet religious. Lyell, Darwin cannot fail to attract Pearce, yet they also threaten his marriage and family, his very social standing. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY PROSE on the title page. The au pair for the Porter family, Haitian-born Simone, becomes witness to the family's casual cruelty, observing the activities of Rosemary, a sculptor, her philandering husband, her mercurial friends, and her strange children. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. London, J. M. Dent, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly worn dust jacket, 112 pages with 12 drawings by the author. Fit for a duchess, indeed, was the splendid up-to-date privy which the Budd family finally achieved, after generations of living with a noisome hut in the garden. But, as usually happens, there was a canker: the marvels of modern technology defeated them. Here splendidly remembered as in her previous books, Dust to Dust and A Prospect of Love, is this and more of life in southern England in the 1930s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, light green cloth with dark green lettering in a bright dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 309 pages. Rear dj lists to Betty Zane. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A large and awkward New England family salvages life the best it can in the aftermath of the sudden death of the mother, Rosie Vincent. The author's first novel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st US, 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, quarter green cloth cover with patterned boards, 368 pages. A novel from Norway. Translated from the Norwegian by Edwin Bjorkman. Front dust jacket flap glued to inside front cover.Clean bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 235 pages, top edge gilt. A novel from English author Henry Williamson in which he uses the concept of the stars - a regular feature in his work - to explore the nature of good and evil, with the author describing it as a celestial fantasy. With full plate and vignette wood engravings from Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe, an internationally renowned naturalistic painter of British birds and other wildlife. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 275 pages. In April 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article that stunned the sports community. George Plimpton's 13-page profile of Sidd Finch, a mysterious pitcher who had been signed by the New York Mets and reportedly threw 168 mph, came complete with photos from spring training, scouting reports, and interviews with Mets players and management. A week later, SI apologized to readers around the world for their role in what is generally regarded as the greatest hoax in the history of sports journalism. The magazine had teamed up with the legendary author and Paris Review bon vivant for an April Fool's Day prank of unprecedented proportions. After the success of the article, Plimpton decided to turn the story into a novel -- a rousing baseball fairy tale that is considered one of the most memorable sports novels of the last half-century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Riverhead Books, 1st US, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with Nobel Prize sticker on front, 992 pages. The Nobel Prize-winners richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas-and a new unrest-begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 273 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, The Franklin Library, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, First Edition thus. SIGNED by Updike, with "special message" by him and b&w illustrations by Michael Deas not in the trade edition. Basis for the movie of the same name starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon as the three repressed women who accidentally conjure what they believe to be the perfect man (Jack Nicholson, playing the devil). Full green, gilt-decorated leather; all edges gilt; ribbon place marker. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Random House/Vintage Contemporaries, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 1st printing of the first American trade edition SIGNED by Ford on the title page with a black pen. No inscription. A trade paper original with glossy card covers. March Date: 1986. First edition is stated on the copyright page. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st US, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 252 pages. While almost all of Duras's novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception--until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras's classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of France. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Beech Tree Books, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 189 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Price sticker on front inside of dj. Internally clean and tight with only light wear to cover boards.

Hardcover. New York, Scribner, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 338 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Clean, tight copy. A novel about the author Henry James that attracted praise from reviewers nationwide. It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Toibin, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Toibin inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true.

Hardcover. Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co., 1st, 1914, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 404 pages, color frontispiece and 3 duo-tone plates by J.N. Marchand. With the scarce dustjacket, light edgewear, chipping to corners. Previous owner's stamp on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. Toronto CA, McClelland & Stewart, 1st Canadian, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with black lettering, 312 pages. "An Englishman's home may be his castle, but to Sir Buckstone Abbott, Walsinford Hall was nothing but a blot on the landscape. With its glazed red bricks, its dome and minarets, it so jarred upon his sensitive soul that it was his avowed intention to unload the unsightly pile on the first prospective buyer. His chance came when the Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek expressed the opinion that the Hall was 'cute' and began toying with the idea of purchasing it." Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 363 pages. Introduction by Melvin van Peebles. Originally published in 1953 as "Cast the First Stone" which was edited and changed by the publisher and now has been restored to how Himes intended it to be "with its raw honesty and startling compassion entirely intact." His novel of Jimmy Monroe portrays an African American prisoner who must endure racism, homosexuality, and prison corruption, all of which test the limits of his sanity, his capacity for suffering, and his definition of love. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Avon Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. It begins in a near future New York City, when Antar, a low-level programmer and data analyst for a large bureaucratic concern, comes upon the lost and battered I.D. card of a man he once knew--a man who vanished without a trace some where in the teeming excess of Calcutta, India, several years before. Strangely compelled, Antar initiates a search into the facts behind the disappearance of the enigmatic L. Murugan, and is unwittingly drawn into a bizarre alternate history of medical science. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 1990, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 161 pages, black cloth, book slightly cocked. Dust jacket edgeworn with light chipping. INSCRIBED BY HARRIS ( "Joyce and Irving, with love, Wilson & Margaret 1990") on the title page to Joyce and Irving Adler. The book is heavily annotated and underlined in both ink and light pencil by Joyce who was a literary scholar who wrote two books on Harris.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unc;ipped dust jacket. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into a bustling Indian eneighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world. Young Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 142 pages. Hardcover. Yellow endpapers. Some agewear. Black cover boards, tan quarter cloth. Dust jacket unclipped, slightly tanned, some chipping with light agewear (see image). Binding good. Spine straight. Pages unmarked. Very good condition. Kosinski has written a modern parable, which is actually a suspense story. It is remarkable for its tension, wit, and irony. It is exciting, and it is memorable.

Hardcover. NY, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. First novel by the author of I Cover the Waterfront. Harried businessman takes a year off to loaf on a houseboat. Clean, tight copy.

New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good , Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Based on the edition by Alphonse Jacobs, translated from French by Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray. 428 pages including index.

Hardcover. NY, The Limited Editions Club, 1st thus, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover Limited edition (No. 1075 of 1500 copies). Signed by the illustrator on the Limitation Page. Quarter bound in publisher's brown leather over gilt embossed khaki boards, gilt lettering and decoration on spine, gilt mystic maze decoration on covers. Illustrated with 16 full-page, full-color plates (including two double-page spreads) hand-colored by Frank Hudec, as well as in-text drawings, historiated initials, and head and tail-pieces by Robin Jacques. Introduction by Charles Edmund Carrington. Slipcase with light wear, soil. Book very good with a mild misty odor.

Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 11th pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era, and one of the greatest African-American writers of this century. "Early Novels and Stories" presents the novels and short stories that established Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism with rare verbal eloquence. This volume includes his first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), "Giovanni's Room" (1956), and other early works. 970 pages, Remainder mark to bottom edge otherwise like new.