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Rare & Out-of-Print Literature Books - pg. 10 including Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by: Robert D. Richardson Jr.

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Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by: Robert D. Richardson Jr.
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Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
by: Robert D. Richardson Jr.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 455 pages. This biography of Henry Thoreau offers insight into his social activism, his interest in fine arts, William Gilpin and John Ruskin's influence on his nature writing, and his involvement in, and influence by, the Agassiz-Darwin debate over "The Origin of Species." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Record # 387954

Price: $30.00
Price: $30.00 

Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson by: Paul Perry
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Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson
by: Paul Perry

Hardcover. NY, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 274 pages, with b&w photographs. Very clean and tight copy. Unauthorized biography of Hunter Thompson. Perry takes us on a journey through Thompson's booze and drug fueled rise to fame. From a young yahoo in Louisville, Kentucky-drinking heavily and playing with his rifle, to the first hand secrets of Thompson's inventive and irreverent gonzo jounralism. A look at a man who was a horror to some, a hero to others.

Record # 391428

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

The Intussusception of Miss Mary America by: Harmon, William
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The Intussusception of Miss Mary America
by: Harmon, William

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.

Record # 396455

Price: $28.00
Price: $28.00 

Horace Walpole and His World; Select Passages from His Letters by: Horace Walpole / L.B. Seeley (Editor)
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Horace Walpole and His World; Select Passages from His Letters
by: Horace Walpole / L.B. Seeley (Editor)

Hardcover. London, Seeley And Co., reprint, 1895, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, 296 pages. B&w frontis portrait with tissue guard. Ex-lib with stamping, bookplate to endpapers, interior clean.

Record # 396490

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller by: Miller Henry & Bern Porter
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The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller
by: Miller Henry & Bern Porter

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Bern Porter, 1st, 1945, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. No. 260 out of 750 copies bound for distribution. 157 pages. Tan boards with wear and soiling, gray cloth spine. Shelving information on spine. Front hinge cracked. Ex-library. Printed on various colored paper, with contributions by a lot of well known authors, including Williams, Patchen, Durrell, Lamantia, many others. Edges soiled. Interior very good.

Record # 396540

Price: $20.00
Price: $20.00 

Horace Walpole: Memoirs and Portraits by: Hodgart, Matthew (Ed.)
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Horace Walpole: Memoirs and Portraits
by: Hodgart, Matthew (Ed.)

Hardcover. London, B. T. Batsford, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 264 pages, b&w illustrations. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Record # 396542

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom and H. L. Mencken by: Martin, Edward A./ Mencken, H. L.
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In Defense of Marion: The Love of Marion Bloom and H. L. Mencken
by: Martin, Edward A./ Mencken, H. L.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 397 pages. This documentary history chronicles what in duration and volatile intensity was the most important love relationship in H.L. Mencken's life, one that he tried to obscure and hoped would remain buried within the copious record of his achievements as author and editor. The love between Marion Bloom and Mencken flourished during a period when he wrote frequently about women's issues. In Defense of Marion both illuminates Mencken's ambivalent attitudes toward the "New Woman" and presents a particularized social history of the intellectual and personal aspirations of many women during the early twentieth century. Bloom and Mencken met in 1914 and became lovers within a few months. Their intimacy continued, on and off, until about a year before Mencken's marriage to Sara Haardt in 1930. Edward A. Martin, who supplies a wealth of interpretive notes and commentary, tells of the Mencken-Bloom affair not only through selections from their letters and diaries but also through excerpts from the personal writings of others who were close to the two and who often complicated their relationship. Such relevant figures include Sara Haardt; Estelle Bloom, Marion's sister; Theodore Dreiser, Estelle's lover and employer as an editorial assistant; and the movie star Aileen Pringle, with whom Mencken was infatuated. Clean copy.

Record # 396553

Price: $25.00
Price: $25.00 

Apuleius and The Golden Ass (INSCRIBED COPY) by: Tatum, James
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Apuleius and The Golden Ass (INSCRIBED COPY)
by: Tatum, James

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY TATUM on the front fly leaf. In this readable and scholarly work, Tatum looks at the enduring appeal of Apuleius' novel, the sophistication and artistry the work, and places The Golden Ass within its ancient contexts. This is the first book-length study of The Golden Ass. It is aimed at both specialists and a general audience.

Record # 396554

Price: $25.00
Price: $25.00 

Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition by: Harriet Elinor Smith (Editor)
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Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition
by: Harriet Elinor Smith (Editor)

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 736 pages. The year 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone, Twain's uncensored autobiography is available in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsupressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended. Volume 1 ONLY ( of a planned 3 volume set). Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Record # 396567

Price: $30.00
Price: $30.00 

The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography by: Lane, Margaret
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The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography by: Lane, MargaretThe Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography by: Lane, Margaret

The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography
by: Lane, Margaret

Hardcover. London, Frederick Warne, Revised Ed., 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 173 pages. Illustrated with 8 color and 30 b&w plates. Although Beatrix Potter is known and loved by generations of children brought up on "Peter Rabbit" and others, her life began in great joylessness and solitude. Drawing was her once fascination and her creative genius was able to flourish in the loneliness and isolation of her early years. Despite the fame that her skill was later to bring, she nevertheless preferred to maintain her privacy and hide behind the persona of a Lakeland farmer. Margaret's Lane biography recounts, with reference to letters and photographs, Beatrix Potter's sad childhood, her struggle for independence, her ill-fated love affair and happy marriage. Clean copy.

Record # 396584

Price: $28.00
Price: $28.00 

Joel Chandler Harris: Folklorist by: Stella Brewer Brookes
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Joel Chandler Harris: Folklorist
by: Stella Brewer Brookes

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 2nd pr., 1967, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 182 pages, 5 pages with red underlining. Brookes examines how Harris drew on his extensive knowledge of African American folklore and culture to create the characters in his work. Brookes classifies the Uncle Remus books under seven major categories: trickster tales, other "creeturs," myths, supernatural tales, proverbs, dialect, and songs.

Record # 396665

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

The Lost Soul by: Olga Tokarczuk / Joanna Concejo
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The Lost Soul
by: Olga Tokarczuk / Joanna Concejo

Hardcover. NY, Seven Stories Press, 2nd pr., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, illustrated in color by Joanna Concejo. The Lost Soul is a deeply moving reflection on our capacity to live in peace with ourselves, to remain patient, attentive to the world. It is a story that beautifully weaves together the voice of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and the finely detailed wash-and-ink drawings of illustrator Joanna Concejo, who together create a parallel narrative universe full of secrets, evocative of another time. Here a man has forgotten what makes his heart feel full. He moves to a house away from all that is familiar to him to wait for his soul to return. Originally published in Poland in 2017. Clean copy.

Record # 397237

Price: $25.00
Price: $25.00 

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by: Travisano, Thomas
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Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
by: Travisano, Thomas

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 422 pages. Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians -- along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art' --perhaps her most famous-- was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Like new.

Record # 397314

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values by: Gertrude Himmelfarb
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The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values
by: Gertrude Himmelfarb

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.

Record # 397340

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830-1860 by: Susan P. Conrad
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Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830-1860
by: Susan P. Conrad

Softcover. NJ, Citadel Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. Studies the distinctive personalities, problems, and cultural contributions of such women as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, examining the extent to which romanticism encouraged intellectualism among women during the three decades prior to the Civil War. Clean copy.

Record # 397503

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry by: Ross, Andrew
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The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry
by: Ross, Andrew

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 248 pages. Clean copy.

Record # 397576

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White by: Hutchinson, George
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The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White
by: Hutchinson, George

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 541 pages. It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. Clean copy.

Record # 397581

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

Road to Volgograd by: Sillitoe, Alan
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Road to Volgograd
by: Sillitoe, Alan

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.

Record # 397583

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

Repression And Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics Of Cultural Memory 1910-1945 by: Cary Nelson
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Repression And Recovery: Modern American Poetry & Politics Of Cultural Memory 1910-1945
by: Cary Nelson

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to the spine. "Cary Nelson performs an invaluable service to the reader by recovering the work of dozens of forgotten poets, especially women, blacks, and writers on the left, while making it clear that the texts we recover inevitably gain new meaning from their positioning within contemporary culture." Nicely illustrated in b&w and some color, mostly book jackets and title pages of books discussed. Some light pencil marking in margins.

Record # 397587

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry by: Kalaidjian, Walter
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Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry
by: Kalaidjian, Walter

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

Record # 397590

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910 - 1950 by: Gelpi, Albert
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A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910 - 1950
by: Gelpi, Albert

Softcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 482 pages. In this book Professor Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. This large historical argument is developed through monographic chapters on the poets which include close readings of their major poems. Clean copy.

Record # 397591

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830 1914 by: Patrick Brantlinger
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Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830 1914
by: Patrick Brantlinger

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration. Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.

Record # 397592

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Shakespeare's Metrics (INSCRIBED COPY) by: Sipe, Dorothy L.
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Shakespeare's Metrics (INSCRIBED COPY)
by: Sipe, Dorothy L.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a chipped, tape repaired dust jacket. Maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 266 pages. INSCRIBED BY SIPE on the front fly leaf to fellow professor Roger Mitchell. English majors are used to being told that Shakespeare frequently broke the rules of iambic pentameter, and that as he matured artistically, his usage became bolder and freer. Well, it isn't true. Shakespeare's iambics turn out to be extremely orthodox (which just makes all the more impressive the variations he was able to create within the rules). In 1968 Dorothy Sipe went to the remarkable labor of demonstrating this objectively through a painstaking analysis of over 13,000 lines of verse. She also supplied information I've never found anywhere else on the prosodic rules taught by poets to poets in Shakespeare's day. All this said, including a five star rating for the perfect achievement of its goal, the book is definitely not for everyone interested in Shakespeare's verse and methods. It is devoted to proving a highly specific case by means of many, many examples that non-specialists are likely to find tedious. But if you are deeply interested in some subjects -- Shakespeare's iambics, his coinages, and the history of English iambic technique -- it is well worth your time. Dust jacket tanned, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Record # 397593

Price: $80.00
Price: $80.00 

Letters of Delmore Schwartz by: Phillips, Robert (Ed.)
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Letters of Delmore Schwartz
by: Phillips, Robert (Ed.)

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.

Record # 397594

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

Fugitives' Reunion; Conversations at Vanderbilt: May 3-5, 1956 by: Purdy, Rob Roy (Ed.)
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Fugitives' Reunion; Conversations at Vanderbilt: May 3-5, 1956
by: Purdy, Rob Roy (Ed.)

Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray cloth with black and gilt title block on spine. 224 pages, Introduction by Louis D. Rubin Jr. B&w frontis portrait of participants: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,Merrill Moore, and others. The Fugitive was a poetry magazine published in the 1920s and this is a record of their gathering some 30 years later with their commentaries. Small name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Record # 397596

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology 1933-1940 by: Conroy, Jack/ Curt Johnson, editors
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Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology 1933-1940
by: Conroy, Jack/ Curt Johnson, editors

Hardcover. NY, Lawrence Hill and Company, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 234 pages.Introduction by Jack Conroy. Other contributors include Nelson Algren, Langston Hughes, Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, William Carlos Williams, Michael Gold, Kenneth Patchen and Karl Shapiro. Clean, tight copy. Cheap paper tanning.

Record # 397598

Price: $20.00
Price: $20.00 

The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America by: Kostelanetz, Richard
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The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America
by: Kostelanetz, Richard

Hardcover. NY, Sheed and Ward, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with faded spine, 480 pages. Richard Kostelanetz's monumental evisceration of the American book world circa 1974--the self-appointed backslapping elites, the perpetual disdain for the unconventional, the laziness in book reviewing and fear of losing one's status when criticising the wrong thing--remains, as a final sadness, itself a rare out of print tome. Kostelanetz has written perhaps the most fearless exploration of literary politics in print, taking on and naming the titans at the top of the heap, dissecting the power structures that emerged in the 1950s and 60s, and the emergence of the plutocratic hierarchies that continue to dominate publishing. Outing the various cliques as mobs, and using apt and amusing mafia parallels, Kostelanetz is unrelenting in his meticulousness, and counteracts the status quo with a passionate defence of the avant-garde, using the second half of the book to bring light to the various emerging authors of experimental poetry, fiction, and mixed media works around the time. At times a touch long-winded and overfed with quotes, this nevertheless is an essential read for those requiring a hard slap as to the inherent evil of the corporate book world and why indie is the only way forward. Clean copy.

Record # 397608

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by: Andrew Wilson
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Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
by: Andrew Wilson

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover un a bright dust jacket, 534 pages, b&w photos. Patricia Highsmith - author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley - had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension'. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death. Paper tanning slightly, clean copy.

Record # 397610

Price: $20.00
Price: $20.00 

A Practical New Grammar with Exercises of Bad English or an Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing The English Language Properly and Correctly by: A. Fisher
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A Practical New Grammar with Exercises of Bad English or an Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing The English Language Properly and Correctly by: A. FisherA Practical New Grammar with Exercises of Bad English or an Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing The English Language Properly and Correctly by: A. Fisher

A Practical New Grammar with Exercises of Bad English or an Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing The English Language Properly and Correctly
by: A. Fisher

Hardcover. London/Gainsbourgh, Osborne and Griffin & H. Mozley, reprint, 1788, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with brown calf spine. 240 pages. Spine shows no title. With a Curious and Useful Appendix. Title page states: A New Edition, Enlarged, Improved, and Corrected. Very nice condition, solid binding with normal edgewear to corners and edges of spine. Names on inside front cover, otherwise a clean copy.

Record # 397611

Price: $100.00
Price: $100.00 

The Making of a Poem by: Spender, Stephen
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The Making of a Poem
by: Spender, Stephen

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

Record # 397612

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

Adventures in Genius by: Durant, Will
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Adventures in Genius
by: Durant, Will

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with faded gilt title on spine, 426 pages. A collection of profiles on great thinkers and writers through the ages. B&w frontis of Walt Whitman, 9 other b&w portraits. Clean copy.

Record # 397627

Price: $50.00
Price: $50.00 

A Book of Common Praise by: Boyers, Robert
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A Book of Common Praise
by: Boyers, Robert

Hardcover. Keene NY, Ausable Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 264 pages. Miniature critical essays on contemporary poets and fiction writers. Originally written as introductions to public readings, these essays are unabashedly celebratory, a welcome relief from the usual critical fare. As a critic, Boyers has been praised by such literary giants as Harold Bloom and John Bayley. Authors covered: Joseph Brodsky, Carl Dennis, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, Robert Pinsky, Saul Bellow, Nicholas Delbanco, Bernard Malamud, Jay McInerney, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, and many others. Clean copy.

Record # 397629

Price: $25.00
Price: $25.00 

The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts by: Kraus, Karl; /Ungar, Frederick(Ed.) /Wright, E Sue (transl.)
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The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts
by: Kraus, Karl; /Ungar, Frederick(Ed.) /Wright, E Sue (transl.)

Hardcover. NY, Frederick Ungar, 1st thus, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 263 pages. 1st American Edition of this Abridged Translation. This is Kraus's masterpiece, with half of Europe as its stage. It is presented here in English for the first time, in an abridged version that preserves the essence of the 800-page original. Its influence on Brecht, Ionesco, and other playwrights is acknowledged. Mingling actual quotations, news reports, and government orders with Kraus's own satiric dialogue, this immense drama (never meaning to be performed) offers a vast fresco of events at the front and at home during, as it prophesied, the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, Kraus anticipated the development of atomic warfare and its threat to all mankind. Some of Kraus is untranslatable, but, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review, "Ungar has done us a benefit at least by bringing us a bit closer to this sharp-eyed, angry, prickly, lover-hater of mankind." INSCRIBED BY FREDERICK UNGAR, the editor and publisher on the half-title page. He also wrote the 14 page introduction. Clean copy.

Record # 397630

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

The Ferment of Realism American Literature, 1884-1919 by: Berthoff, Warner
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The Ferment of Realism American Literature, 1884-1919
by: Berthoff, Warner

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.

Record # 397639

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde Decadence Kitsch by: Calinescu, Matei

Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde Decadence Kitsch
by: Calinescu, Matei

Hardcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 335 pages. Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity-the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours-is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, Name on front fly leaf, several pages with light ink markings.

Record # 397674

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

Preserve and Create; Essays in Marxist Literary Criticism by: LeRoy, Gaylord C./Beitz, Ursula
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Preserve and Create; Essays in Marxist Literary Criticism
by: LeRoy, Gaylord C./Beitz, Ursula

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

Record # 397693

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

A Republic if You Can keep It by: Earl Warren
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A Republic if You Can keep It
by: Earl Warren

Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 201 pages. Stated first edition, 1972, but actually a book club edition with the telltale little indentation at the bottom right of the rear cover, no price on dj flap. Warren served as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and is generally considered to be one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of the United States. This is a great book on the foundations of our republic and on how to preserve it. Chief Justice Warren explains history and Constitutional law in common terms that are easy to digest. This book stresses the importance of civic engagement, the Bill of Rights, and the need for ethics and respect in a republic. Clean copy.

Record # 397694

Price: $30.00
Price: $30.00 

Playful Fictions and Fictional Players Game Sport and Survival in Contemporary American Fiction by: Berman, Neil David
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Playful Fictions and Fictional Players Game Sport and Survival in Contemporary American Fiction
by: Berman, Neil David

Hardcover. Port Washington NY, Kennikat Press, 1ST, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown covers with yellow and green lettering on front and spine and green sports figures on front. 112 pages. A Critical Look at Game, Sport, and Survival in Contemporary American Fiction. Clean copy.

Record # 397696

Price: $28.00
Price: $28.00 

The Poetics of Wrongness by: Rachel Zucker
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The Poetics of Wrongness
by: Rachel Zucker

Softcover. Seattle, Wave Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 219 pages. A collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares 'I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.' Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde-among many others-into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet's need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Clean copy.

Record # 397722

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by: Toibin, Colm
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
by: Toibin, Colm

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.

Record # 397748

Price: $18.00
Price: $18.00 

Rereading (INSCRIBED COPY) by: Calinescu, Matei
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Rereading (INSCRIBED COPY)
by: Calinescu, Matei

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement, and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This fascinating book by Matei Calinescu is the first to focus on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. Calinescu analyzes fictional works by Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, and Henry James, among others, explaining how reading texts is related both to symbolic play or make-believe and to games with rules. He reviews the history of reading in modern times, discussing, for example, how the Reformation led to rereadings of Scripture and how the proliferation of books during the Enlightenment led to a shift from "intensive reading" to "extensive reading." Calinescu looks at the distinctions between reading and rereading from the perspectives of the age, situation, and gender of the individual reader. He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a select audience of "secret sharers," or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues persuasively that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading. Clean, bright copy.

Record # 397755

Price: $60.00
Price: $60.00 

The Lion and the Honeycomb. Essays in Solicitude and Critique by: Blackmur, R.P.
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The Lion and the Honeycomb. Essays in Solicitude and Critique
by: Blackmur, R.P.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 309 pages. A collection of essays from the famed literary critic. Clean copy.

Record # 397765

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (6 Volumes) by: Emerson, Ralph Waldo and Rusk, Ralph L. (Ed.)
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The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (6 Volumes)
by: Emerson, Ralph Waldo and Rusk, Ralph L. (Ed.)

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Six matching volumes, red cloth bindings with black/gilt titling on spines, gilt initials on front board. Covers Emerson's letters from 1813 to 1881. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an influential American essayist, philosopher, and poet, known for leading the Transcendentalist movement. His works emphasized individualism, nature, and self-reliance, significantly impacting American literature and thought. NOT ex-lib, clean complete set. Due to weight DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Record # 397775

Price: $180.00
Price: $180.00 

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 by: Highsmith, Patricia/ Editor: von Planta, Anna
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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
by: Highsmith, Patricia/ Editor: von Planta, Anna

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Record # 397844

Price: $40.00
Price: $40.00 

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 by: Highsmith, Patricia/ Editor: von Planta, Anna
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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
by: Highsmith, Patricia/ Editor: von Planta, Anna

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta -- traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Record # 397845

Price: $40.00
Price: $40.00 

The Peyote Dance by: Artaud, Antonin
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The Peyote Dance
by: Artaud, Antonin

Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 105 pages. Translated by Helen Weaver. Writings by Artaud about his experience with the Tarahumara Indians in 1936, their rituals and ceremonies, and his efforts to find alternatives to what he felt was an increasingly limited European view of the mind and consciousness. Clean copy.

Record # 397861

Price: $25.00
Price: $25.00 

On the Rez by: Frazier, Ian
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On the Rez
by: Frazier, Ian

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 311 pages. A perceptive visitor's report of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the poorest places in the United States. Profiles the Oglala Sioux living there and along the way a female basketball star. Clean copy.

Record # 397881

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE Volume X Spring 1977 No. 4 by: Ray B. Browne (Ed.)
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JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE Volume X Spring 1977 No. 4
by: Ray B. Browne (Ed.)

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 701-909. Articles include: Philip Gordon on Ayn Rand. Louis F. Helbig on Struwwelpeter: an inquiry into the effects of violence in children's literature. French folk songs. D. L. Ashliman on the American Indian in German Travel Narratives and Literature. Clean.

Record # 397900

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 

JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE: Volume X Summer 1976 No. 1 by: Ray B. Browne (Ed.)
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JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE: Volume X Summer 1976 No. 1
by: Ray B. Browne (Ed.)

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.

Record # 397901

Price: $15.00
Price: $15.00 

The Physical Basis of Mind: A Symposium. by: Laslett, Peter, ed.
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The Physical Basis of Mind: A Symposium.
by: Laslett, Peter, ed.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st US, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 79 pages. Talks originally delivered on the BBC Third Programme, on what goes on in the body when men and animals are thinking. A Series of Broadcast Talks by Sir Charles Sherrington, E.D. Adrian, W.E. Le Gros Clark, S. Zuckerman, E.T.O. Slater, Wilder Penfield, W. Russell Brain, Viscount Samuel, A.J. Ayer & Gilbert Ryle. Dust jacket shows wear at edges and darkening to paper. Clean, tight copy.

Record # 397902

Price: $12.00
Price: $12.00 


  

Rare & Antiquarian Literature

Our literature shelves hold used, rare and out-of-print books on writers and writing: literary criticism, essays, letters, autobiography and multi-volume collected works. Titles include Hans Christian Andersen's The Fairy Tale of My Life, Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Thomas Fensch's Steinbeck and Covici.

Collectors will find substantial sets and antiquarian printings, such as Thomas Moore's seventeen-volume The Works of Lord Byron and works in the original language like Georges Simenon's Le Roman de l'Homme. Editions range from later reprints to scarce cloth-bound hardcovers, and each is described down to its edition and binding.

As these are used and rare books, condition and availability vary from copy to copy. Order online and add it to your shelf.