Hardcover. Saint Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st US, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages. This is Petterson's third novel, first published in Norway in 1996 and translated into English, by Anne Born, two years later. A girl reminisces about growing up in Nazi-occupied Norway and forming a bond with her brother, active in the resistance, within an unhappy family. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Saint Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st US, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 258 pages. Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born This novel about a Norwegian retiree reflecting on incidents from his youth was an international success, received several awards and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the New York Times First published in Oslo in 2003, this first English translation was published in London in 2005. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Saint Paul MN, Thomas Dunne Books, 1st US, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 202 pages. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 2nd pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY BEGLEY on the front fly leaf in the year of publication. This autobiographical Holocaust novel won the Hemingway/PEN Award in 1991. The French version (Une education polonaise) won the Prix Medicis etranger in 1992. Begley's debut novel. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st Canadian, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 355 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY BANKS on the half-title page. Tight 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. Sag Harbor NY, Permanent Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY DEFILIPPI to fellow author Barry Estabrook on the title page. Fate-driven story of boyhood friendship and its unraveling. A nostalgic revisiting of childhood shenanigans during the 1950's and 60's in a tough section of Long Island called Duck Alley. Clean copy.
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. NY, W W Norton & Co, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime A.hievement Award . An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women. Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel's orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather's poetry seems to guide her home. The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances-of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Clean copy.
NY, Random House, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream. The unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy. 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, Delacorte Press, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. An unusual work in that Gallico wrote this not as a sequel to his book THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE but rather as a sequel to the film version. The film featured some plot and character changes which Gallico incorporates into this novel. Clean copy.
Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. First work of longer fiction (although still a brief one) by this Virginia-born poet and short story writer. A moving story of jazz and an old muscian brought back to the United States as a 'museum project' to capture his creative process and preserve his music. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 201 pages. A man's obsession with his late wife takes a new turn when he meets an uncompromising, manipulative playwright whose favored theme is death. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 275 pages. A very clean, tight copy. An epic storyteller who deals in great vistas and vast distances. The author's second collection of three novelllas, including a continuation of the adventures of Brown Dog, "The Seven-Ounce Man."
Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, white cloth with gilt lettering on spine, and author's initials on front cover. #253 out of 300, numbered and SIGNED BY DILLARD and in a printed slipcase. Dillard's first novel, a tale of rough settlement life in northwest Washington state in the 1850s. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Doubleday Publishing, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background--murdered drug dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity--can be a key to doors he didn't even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer. As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there's not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn't seem to care about Javi's newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after Javi graduates, a viral essay transforms him from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his "unique perspective." But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once Gio's released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi's charade, or will it all come crumbling down? Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations by Spiegelman. Maus is a holocaust survival story, a biography, and an autobiography. Written as a graphic novel (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize), Art Spiegelman captures the process of interviewing his father while simultaneously telling his father's story. In that sense, the text is very self-reflexive - there are parts in it showing Spiegelman working to create the very page you read, as previous parts of the his father's story are reintroduced from previous portions of the text. The story is complex. It not only details the horrors of the holocaust and the extreme lengths to which people went to survive, but it also captures the harrowing guilt survivors faced, and the lifelong aftereffects of the war. It also shows the struggle between father and son, both through the lens of a typical familial challenge, and of those unique between a survivor and child born afterwards.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers with pictorial design of girl on a horse stamped in white and black. 153 pages illustrated with 5 b&w plates by Lucius Hitchcock. Twain's historical fiction novel, partially written from the point of view of Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, Soldier Boy. This novel was first published in two installments in August and September 1906 in 'Harper's Magazine'. Twain's daughter Susy Clemens, who died in 1896 at age 24 of spinal meningitis, is understood to be the inspiration for lead character Cathy Alison. When Twain provided the story to Harper's, he included a photograph of Susy for the illustrator to use for Cathy. Spine is lightly faded, otherwise a bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers stamped in black and white with a collie and her pup on the cover. 36 pages, 4 color plates by W.T. Smedley. Story told from a dog's perspective. Light fading to spine, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, Oneiric Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 222 pages. Wilson has blended H.P. Lovecraft's dark vision with his own revolutionary philosophy and unique narrative powers to produce a stunning, high-tension story of vaulting imagination. A professor makes a horrifying discovery while excavating a sinister archeological site. For over 200 years, mind parasites have been lurking in the deepest layers of human consciousness, feeding on human life force and steadily gaining a foothold on the planet. Now they threaten humanity's extinction. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light fading to spine. Collection of stories about a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War. First trade edition with 1 in number row. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Alfed A. Knopf, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Novel set in a small town in Maine. Made into an HBO mini-series with Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt and Paul Newman.
Hardcover. Saint Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Winner of the S. Miriella Gable Prize. Amy Hempel has said "Victoria Redel's contribution to the literature of obsession is rendered with unusual delicacy and daring." In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, and yet through her we see the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all devotion. After all, "Who has ever wanted to share a love?" Clean, bight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 391 pages. Attractive copy of the fourth novel by Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Russo. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a duck, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father, the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park. Such is the canvas of Richard Russo's Straight Man, a novel of surpassing wit, poignancy, and insight. As he established in his previous books Russo is unique among contemporary authors for his ability to flawlessly capture the soul of the wise guy and the heart of a difficult parent. In Hank Devereaux, Russo has created a hero whose humor and identification with the absurd are mitigated only by his love for his family, friends, and, ultimately, knowledge itself. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 970 pages. Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change. Remainder dot to bottom edge, 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, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Provides fresh insight into the age old tale of a woman who grows as an individual and literally explodes out of her marriage. May Sarton describes the burgeoning artist confined by a social contract. Light fading to spine. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Summit Books, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom edge, otherwise clean. Marge Piercy, whose earlier novels have chronicled the female experience in the turbulent '60s and 70s, now turns her considerable skill and passion to the 1950s in this portrait of women in transition from repression to freedom. Through the intense friendship between Jill and her cousin, Donna, we see and feel what it was like to grow up in Detroit in the '50s and go to college when the first seeds of freedom were sown. Through Jill's childhood friend Howie, and her relationships with Mike and Peter, we come to understand the danger that sex posed when abortions were illegal, making the outcome of a chance encounter of a night of love a matter of life and death. And, through Marge Piercy's brilliant, thought-provoking novel, our lives are illuminated.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A massive novel illustrated with photographs by Joel Gardner. John Gardner's final novel follows Peter Mickelsson, former football player and current Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. Mickelsson is driven, opinionated, probably a drunk, definitely bankrupt, and perhaps going completely mad. During his personal descent, which he seems powerless to arrest, he somehow scrounges enough money together to buy a farmhouse in northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains, which seems to be haunted by the ghosts of an incestuous family. Mickelsson's farmhouse sanctuary was (it turns out) not only the residence of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, but the scene of a murder; the place is haunted. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, The Viking Press, 1st US, 1964, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly soiled and worn dust jacket, 186 pages. The little world of a public school, with its grudges and rivalries, reaches out into the little world of the aged, as the Old Boys grimly battle over the post of President of the Association.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with $2.50 on flap, 304 pages. Stated First Edition with M-I code on copyright page. Title-page printed in red and black. Original gray cloth lettered in black, backstrip decorated in red and lettered in black. "George Brush, a traveling textbook salesman, is a fervent religious convert who is determined to lead a good life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois and into the soul of America itself."
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. Winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982. INSCRIBED BY UPDIKE on the front fly leaf: " for Dee- Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Harry Angstrom and his friend John Updike". Stated First Edition of Updike's most famous book of the four-part Harry Angstrom saga. Clean.
Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a very worn dust jacket with tape repairs. Black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Vidal's second novel, a work with some gay aspects but one in which the author felt he played things a bit too safely. "Robert Holton has just returned from the torment and strife of war in Europe and settled in a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroking business The haunting memories of nights of love spent in Florence are suppressed as he struggles to succeed in an arid city." Book is tight and clean.
Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY IRVING at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in red ink on the half-title page. A whimsical family saga of a hotel and a bear and an opera house. Irving's fifth published novel and the basis for a 1984 film adaptation by director Tony Richardson. Clean copy.
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.
Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor and Company, 1st, 1889, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped with gilt lettering, 380 pages. Edgar Watson Howe (May 3, 1853 - October 3, 1937) was an American novelist and newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was perhaps best known for his magazine, E.W. Howe's Monthly, which he wrote from 1911 to 1933. His first novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), was also his best-known. Howe's subsequent novels were neither critically nor popularly successful. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 174 pages. Unclipped dust jacket with very minor wear at very edges. A nice copy. The fourth novel by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Updike features Joey Robinson, an advertising consultant in Manhattan who describes the recent visit he, his second wife and his eleven-year-old stepson made to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up.
Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton-Century, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray cloth with blue lettering, 309 pages. Historical novel set in New Bedford takes up the story of Russell Ashmead, the mildly rebellious middle son of a prosperous New Bedford family, when he is in his late teens, and follows him to the brink of old age. Over the course of the book he assists the escape of a fugitive from enslavement, sails as a foremast hand on a whaling ship, and is witness to fraud, riot, mutiny, and murder. He experiences romance at home and abroad, manages a textile mill, and becomes a shipowner. Bookplate on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright 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. NY, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a very worn and chipped dust jacket, 294 pages. In these four short novels set in America, England and Paris, Rebecca West explores the lives and relationships of rich women and men who are ruled by 'the harsh voice we hear when money talks, or hate'. There is Josie, a flower of American girlhood with boundless ambition for wealth. There is Etienne de Sefavenac, a dilettante French aristocrat whose courtly stratagems are intended to ensnare Nancy Sarle - a plain American businesswoman. There is Alice Pemberton, a sensible Englishwoman - the very salt of the earth - in her own estimation. And lastly there is Sam Hartley, an American businessman who has fought his way to riches with his wife at his side, but whose life is now haunted by visions of beautiful young women.
Hardcover. NY, Ives Washburn, 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 278 pages. A gossipy, humorous story of middle-class angst in a New England town in the 1950s. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Arden Book Co., ist thus, nd, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 276 pages, all edges green. Notable for the great b&w illustrations by Keith Henderson, some double-page. No date give. Dust jacket with some short tape repairs on the verso, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, Berger's 15th novel, a comic masterpiece. First printing, with "1" present on number line. Light green boards with dark green cloth spine. An eerie and clever novel, The Houseguest introduces one of Berger's most dangerous and compelling villains. Clean copy.
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. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1927, Book: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, soiled with fading to spine and gilt on cover. 327 pages. Despite grubby exterior, interior is clean, tight binding. Stated First Edition. No dust jacket.
Hardcover. London, Citadel Press, 1st illust thus, 1948, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Green cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine. Cream jacket decorated in black and green. With 12 black and white woodcuts by Helen Munro.
Record # 387341
Price: $15.00
Out-of-Print & Signed Novels
Our fiction shelves offer used, rare and out-of-print novels across literary and contemporary writing, from mid-century classics to modern first novels, with a steady supply of signed and inscribed copies. Look for D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, Scott Spencer's Preservation Hall and William Sansom's The Face of Innocence.
Signed first editions and proofs turn up often, among them Robert Boswell's Crooked Hearts, James Kelman's A Disaffection and Lois Lowry's The Silent Boy. Editions range from reading copies to collectible hardcovers in original dust jackets, and each is described individually so you know what you are getting.
As these are used and rare books, condition and availability vary from copy to copy. Signed copies rarely come back a second time, so order yours online.