Rare & Out-of-Print Literature Books

Hardcover. NY, Brewer & Warren, 1st US, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with green cloth spine, 494 pages. A scholarly biography of the great French dramatist, b&w illustrations. Light shelf wear. Top of spine has some fading/sunning, no markings.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 6th pr., 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 338 pages. Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth-that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm's absurdity when he had his own epiphany-that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system-that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality "out there" and reality as we experience it. 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. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 395 pages. The essays gathered here, in addition to those by editors Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloob, are written by leading scholars of Asian cultures--among them Donald Keene, Peter Awn, Barbara Stoler Miller, Ainslie Embree, Burton Watson, C.T. Hsia, Paul Anderer, and others. They introduce classics from the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, providing entree to texts which have emerged as monuments of Asian thought and literature. Among the works discussed are the Qu'ran, the philosophy of history of Ibn Khaldun, the Upanishads, the epic Mahabarata, the philosopher Mencius, the Lotus Sutra, T'and Poetry, the Tale of Genji, and the poet Basho.

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

Hardcover. New York City, Blue Faun Publications, 1st, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 203 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated pastedown on front cover designed by Mahlon Blaine. Illustrated endpapers by Heinrich Vogeler. "The entire edition of Colours is limited to 1950 copies; 1900 copies numbered and registered, for sale; and 50 copies, lettered A to XX, for review only. Type has been distributed, and Colours will not be reprinted. This copy is No. 386". Some foxing to front cover pastedown, and narrow chip missing from spine label. Spine slightly cocked. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. Liverpool, Caxton Press, 1st, 1820, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 1527 pages, b&w frontispiece. Half-leather covers w/ faded gilt lettering on spine. Edge wear, soiling to boards. Previous owner's signature and markings on front fly leaf. Light staining, yellowing to pages. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. MA, University of Massachusetts Press , 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 268 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Dust jacket with light edgewear and sunning and a small sticker-stain to front cover.

Softcover. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 355 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics.

Hardcover. New York, Fred De Fau & Company, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two volumes, hardcovers.798 pages total. B/w frontispieces with tissue guards. B/w illustrations throughout. Top edges gilt. Dark green cloth boards, gilt titles on spines, some light shelf wear. Tanning to pages and edges from age. Bindings good. Pages unmarked. Spines straight. A sequel to The Three Musketeers in which the four soldiers were brought together again after years of separation. They will live to repeat the glorious performances of their youth.

Softcover. Willamette, Willamette Week, 1st wraps, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Columns from her early column in the Willamette Week newspaper. SIGNED BY DUNN.

Hardcover. McFarland and Co., 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 331 pages. Hardcover. Brick cloth covered boards with gilt titles to cover & spine. Profusely illustrated in black & white. Features facsimile copies of notes made by the author held at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. The Notes are kept in a specially made box with manuscripts by Stoker's fellow Dubliners Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll among other writers. Tight binding, sharp corners, clean & unmarked pages.

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

Softcover. Oakland CA, PM Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. Sticking It to the Man tracks the ways in which the changing politics and culture of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were reflected in pulp and popular fiction in the United States, the UK, and Australia. Featuring more than three hundred full-color covers, the book includes in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, articles, and reviews from more than two dozen popular culture critics and scholars. Among the works explored, celebrated, and analyzed are books by street-level hustlers turned best-selling black writers Iceberg Slim, Nathan Heard, and Donald Goines; crime heavyweights Chester Himes, Ernest Tidyman, and Brian Garfield; Yippies Anita Hoffman and Ed Sanders; best-selling authors such as Alice Walker, Patricia Nell Warren, and Rita Mae Brown; and a myriad of lesser-known novelists ripe for rediscovery.

Hardcover. London, Peter Owen , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. An acclaimed and most unusual biography of Baudelaire, showing him ensnared by his passions for poetry, prostitutes, and drugs.A crucial link between romanticism and modernism, Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought. His influence on modern poetry is immense. In the English language, where his literary reputation is less well known, it is his link with drug culture that gives him contemporary resonance. It is commonly known that Baudelaire used opium. Many writers have described him as being addicted to the drug, but none of his biographers, Frank Hilton argues, has fully understood the effect of opiate addiction on the personality and, in the case of Baudelaire, the extent to which it damaged his life and work. In this original contribution to Baudelaire studies Hilton contends that the drug is at the root of all Baudelaire's problems and in particular--something that constantly tormented him--his chronic inability to apply himself to any prolonged creative work. Unquestionably, there is significantly more to Baudelaire than his opium addiction. But a proper awareness of what it did to the poet helps to illuminate those puzzling aspects of his life and behavior that were not previously understood. Written with the general reader in mind, Baudelaire in Chains will give those who know little or nothing about him a comprehensive picture of his life. To those who know a great deal it will present him in an unexpected light.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 512 pages. B&w illustrations. With this handsome book, David Sweetman, a biographer of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, brings together the dissolute lives of various artists who came to represent decadent fin-de-siecle Paris: Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon, Alfred Jarry, and, of course, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. As the author reminds us, imitations of the latter's work adorn the walls of French-themed bars worldwide and have become a shorthand for sanitized debauchery. Toulouse-Lautrec--absinthe drinker and brothel frequenter--was instrumental in the development of the poster, but what is his artistic legacy? Although Toulouse-Lautrec dominates the book's subtitle, Sweetman's sweep is much grander. In much the same way as his main subject was, Sweetman proves a sympathetic host to the women of Montmartre, tragic figures such as La Goulue, Jane Avril, and Suzanne Valadon, and he is particularly insightful on the singer Aristide Bruant's influence on the fledgling artist. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 400 pages. Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is considered the first modern writer for children and the inventor of the children's adventure story. In The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, award-winning biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons uncovers the little-known details of her life, introducing readers to the Fabian Society cofounder and fabulous socialite who hosted legendary parties and had admirers by the dozen, including George Bernard Shaw. Through Nesbit's letters and archival research, Fitzsimons reveals "E." to have been a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism and shows how Nesbit incorporated these ideas into her writing, thereby influencing a generation of children--an aspect of her literary legacy never before examined. Fitzsimons's riveting biography brings new light to the life and works of this famed literary icon, a remarkable writer and woman.

Softcover. NY, George Braziller, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 437 pages. New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self-discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive. Small patch of tanning to bottom corner of last 80 pages. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Francestown NH, Marshall Jones Company, 3rd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt. Dust jacket edgeworn, chipped. 295 pages. Revised Edition. Third Printing. INSCRIBED by Rosamond Thaxter ("Rosie") on half title page.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday and Co., 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, beige cloth with titles in black and blue on spine, no dust jacket, 317 pages. These are the life and times of Col. John R. Stingo, fabulous figure of track and ring. The Colonel who Was a raconteur In The Grand Tradition; He shares his tales Oo rainmaking, horse racing, newspaper writing; and other exploits of his long and kaleidoscopic career. Paper tanning slightly but a clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY SHATTUCK on the half-title page. 369 pages. An intellectual tour-de-force, Forbidden Knowledge is a study of the ethics of literary and scientific inquiry. Shattuck first approaches his subject indirectly, conducting an engaging tour of Western literature: Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then uses these tales to address the moral questions raised.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this compelling new study of one of the century's most memorable poets, Jon Stallworthy has produced an outstanding full-scale biography of Louis MacNeice, drawing on the testimony of family, friends, lovers, and MacNeice's extensive unpublished correspondence and papers. Stallworthy, whose Wilfred Owen was described by Graham Greene as "one of the finest biographies of our time," has produced another no less remarkable life of an equally haunting figure. MacNeice's mother died when he was seven and Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems.

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.

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.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Routledge, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 190 pages. This book examines Gore Vidal's lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing - sex, politics, and religion - this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal's portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal's other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967-2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal's careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Clean copy.

Softcover. Dublin NH, William L Bauhan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 163 pages. An unconventional family idyll in pastoral Bucks County, Pennsylvania of the 1930?s is suddenly broken to pieces by the arrival of a band of writers led by poets Robert Graves and especially Laura Riding. Told from the perspective of her 12-year-old self, the author paints an evocative portrait of a family, friends, childhood adventures and events against the background of a countryside still threaded with dirt roads winding past meadows and woodland, not a shopping mall in sight.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2003, Two hardcovers in dust dackets with sunning to spines, 479 and 493 pages. Andrew Marvell (1621-78) is best known today as the author of a handful of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems. In his own time, however, Marvell was famous for his brilliant prose interventions in the major issues of the Restoration, religious toleration, and what he called "arbitrary" as distinct from parliamentary government. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell's prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context. Four major scholars of the Restoration era have collaborated to produce this truly Anglo-American edition. From the Rehearsal Transpros'd, a serio-comic best-seller which appeared with tacit permission from Charles II himself, through the documentary Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, Marvell established himself not only as a model of liberal thought for the eighteenth century but also as an irresistible new voice in political polemic, wittier, more literary, and hence more readable than his contemporaries. Name, date on front fly leafs, otherwise clean. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Facsimile reprint of 18th century edition; stapled wraps; 66 clean, umarked pages, plus introduction by Malcolm Kelsall. Clean copy.

Softcover. Totonto, University of Toronto Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 444 pages, b&w illustrations. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. The Augustan Reprint Society Number 251-252. Introduction by Janet E. Aikins. Orig. tan card wrappers, stapled binding. An 18th century theatre critic's remarks regarding Otway's play. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a rubbed and edgeworn dust jacket. 433 pages, b&w illustrations. McClure was the father of the muckraking movement and brought about a revolution in American journalism in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His journalistic contributors included Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and he introduced authors such as O. Henry, Booth Tarkington, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane and Jack London to the American public. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 314 pages. Contrasting the Victorian system of virtues - respectability, self-help, discipline, cleanliness, obedience, orderliness - with the opportunistic, superficial morality of modern society, an intellectual historian calls for a deeper commitment to moral responsibility. According to Himmelfarb, Victorian "manners and morals" created a society that emphasized a strong family life for all classes and gave rise to a prosperous economy and the early feminist and social service movements. Furthermore, the influence of these virtues caused the incidence of illegitimate births and violent crimes to drop significantly and remain low until the 1960s. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st pbk., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 76 pages. Annie Dillard's collection of observations of events over three days from her location on a small island in Puget Sound. Stated 1st edition, no number line (1st printing). There is soiling/discoloration to boards (not visible under dust jacket), small chip to bottom of dj spine, clean interior.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Rosa CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 67 pages. Printed paper over boards backed in brown cloth with matching paper spine label. Acetate dust jacket. Remainder mark to top edge.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 391 pages. INSCRIBED BY PAYNE on the half-title page and also SIGNED on the title page. In Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of 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.

Hardcover. Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 177 pages. Perhaps the most significant and influential figure in this century's wave of American realism, Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is credited not only with reviving the short story as an artistically legitimate form, but also with perfecting minimalist fiction. Moving chronologically through Carver's complete short fiction canon and examining key stories in depth, Ewing Campbell traces the author's development through and beyond literary minimalism, into the tradition of tragic allegory. He explores Carvers persistent use of myth and archetype; motifs of the grotesque; religious iconography; and oppressed, spiritually paralyzed characters. From the earliest stories through the latest, Campbell illuminates Carvers constant fascination with the way individuals connect or fail to connect with one another. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages. This book offers eleven essays on Fante's career, ranging from close thematic analysis of individual stories and novels to broadly informed assessments of Fante's life and art in the context of his times. Major areas explored in the book include Fante's treatment of the Italian-American experience; his relationship to other American writers of the 1930s and beyond; the deeply Catholic nature of Fante's fiction; his unique and still-seminal vision of Los Angeles; and his lifelong concern to render in fiction both the comedy and the horrors of the writing life. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Leicester UK, Edmund Ward, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 263 pages. The first attempt to view Andrew Lang's work as a whole, and to attempt some account of the man himself. In specialized fields of scholarship Lang has always held his own; but as a literary figure he has been sadly neglected. Yet the late Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch ranked his style above that of Pater and Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame, and George Saintsbury considered him as among the chief minor poets of his period. As poet and essayist, and also as writer of tales and fairy stories, Andrew Lang at last gets his due in this study. Color frontis. portrait. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.