Short Story Collections | Used, Rare & Out-of-Print - pg. 4 including Love Death and the Ladies Drill Team by: Jessamyn West

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 248 pages. This short story collection contains: A Time of Learning; The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner; Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team; Home Coming; The Battle of the Suits; Tom Wolfe's My Name; Learn to Say Good-by; A Little Collar for the Monkey; Public Address System; Foot-Shaped Shoes; Horace Chooney, M.D.; The Linden Trees; Breach of Promise; and The Singing Lesson. Stated first edition. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket. 294 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. A collection of short stories, from the author's earliest fiction in 1937 to her new novella "Dr. Heart". Clean copy.

NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1903, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray paper covered boards with gilt lettering, top edge gilt, spine ends and corners with light wear, First Edition, frontispiece portrait of author with tissue guard. INSCRIBED BY DASKAM on front fly leaf and dated May 1903. Daskam(1876-1961) was a prolific author of adult and children's fiction whose best-known work was MEMOIRS OF A BABY (1904), a satire on modern methods of child training. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Rob Weisbach/William Morrow, Uncorr. proof, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages. Lime green wraps, uncorrected bound galleys. SIGNED BY DAVIS. A short story collection, the first of only two books by Amanda Davis before she was killed in a plane crash in North Carolina at 32 years old.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Following The Missing Person, her highly praised debut--"A seriously entertaining and probing novel," wrote The Washington Post Book World--Alix Ohlin gives us a collection of stories that demonstrates her impressive range. In their various locales, from Montreal (where a prosthetic leg casts a furious spell on its beholders) to the Southwest (where a Soviet-era exchange student changes a family's dynamic forever), the characters in Babylon are coming to terms with life's epiphanies, for good or ill. They range from the very young who, confronted with their parents' limitations, discover their own resolve, to those facing middle age and its particular indignities, no less determined to assert themselves and shape their destinies. A tenacious eight-year-old practices piano on paper keys; an expectant mother, settling into an idyllic farmhouse, discovers the tragic story of its previous, rightful inhabitants; and a fictional haunted hospital becomes an obsession for a ghostwriter grappling with her empty nest. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. These twelve stories further Joy Williamss utterly singular achievement, described by the Washington Post as poetic, disturbing, yet very funny. Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways-comic, tragic, unnerving-we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss.

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st trade ed., 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in white cloth stamped in maroon and gilt on spine and front cover. Fine in a blue cloth slipcase with a color illustration paste-down on front. The author's strongest collection of stories and the last to be published in his lifetime. One of only 250 numbered copies of the publisher's limited first edition SIGNED by the author. This copy is unnumbered. Carver died at the age of only fifty, shortly after this book was published.

Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers , 1st, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers stamped with brown decoration and lettering. "Selected from The Works of Mark Twain by C.N. Kendall, Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis, and Arranged for Home and Supplementary Reading in the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Grades." - from the title page. Eight b&w plates. Scarce Twain title. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, reprint, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in light green cloth with dark green lettering on cover, 79 pages, b&w frontis. Seven stories set in New England and told, in part, in dialect. Small ownership sticker on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. This collection of twenty-seven stories of Frank O'Connor, written between 1957 and his death in 1966, presents us with a stifling petitbourgeois society which seems deliberately organized to starve the mind and the emotions. Young people, crippled by poverty and sexual timidity, wait for their parents to die in order to marry; illegitimate children dream and mourn over families they never know; middle-aged bachelors nest with their mothers; priests live and die in terrible loneliness. Through all the stories runs the ubiquitous influence of the Church--like drink, a curse of the Irish. And yet somehow, this depressing material is turned in O'Connor's stories to charm. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape, reprint, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 256 pages.Foreword by John Galsworthy. Traveler's Library edition. Bookplate on inside front cover.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bright green cloth with gilt stamped design on front cover, 232 pages. Copyright page states 1899 but roman numerals on title page say 1900, so perhaps second printing. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, Doran and Company, reprint, 1923, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards with tan cloth spine with a blue title label. Preface By Hillaire Belloc. 'Bramah attained commercial and critical success with his creation of Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller. He first appears in The Wallet of Kai Lung which was rejected by eight publishers before Grant Richards published it in 1900. It was still in print a hundred years later. The Kai Lung stories are humorous tales set in China, often with fantasy elements such as dragons and gods." Numeral 1 on copyright page, no date on title page, so suspected 2nd printing. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A clean copy of this Nobel Prize winning author's book of eleven short stories.

Hardcover. NY, R. F. Fenno & Co., 1st, 1898, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in white, unpaginated but approx. 120 pages. Features two short stories by the Polish writer: Sielanka and Orso. This book is NOT to be confused with a book near the same title: Sielanka: A Forest Picture and Other Stories, published the same year by Little, Brown. A small tear to the half title page otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Chatto & Windus, 3rd Ed., 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth, faded gilt title on spine, 480 pages. Contains local folklore under various heading such as Giants, fairies, Tregeagle, mermaids, sorcery & witchcraft etc. A few black and white illustrations by George Cruikshank. Previous owner's stamp to front fly leaf. Otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The New Yorker magazine named Matt Klam one of the twenty best young writers in America, and the seven stories that comprise Sam the Cat are all the proof we need. Knowing, perceptive, and wickedly funny, Matt Klam loves his characters but spares them nothing: the swaggering womanizer Sam falls in love with a woman across a crowded room who, upon closer inspection, turns out to be not quite what he expected; a self-doubting young professional attends the posh wedding of his successful friend and delivers a disastrous toast; the chicken one man's girlfriend is preparing for dinner comes to embody the darkly corrosive element in their relationship. These stories crackle with humor, intelligence and style and add up to an outrageously funny, unforgettable debut. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Viking Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 203 pages. A long novella and a collection of short stories by this South African Nobel Prize lauriate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives. Among the colorful people readers meet are: old man Meecham, who escapes from his nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to "white trash"; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, faces an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; and Bobby Pettijohn -- awakened in the night by a search party after a body is discovered in his back woods. William Gay expertly sets these conflicted characters against lush backcountry scenery and defies our moral logic as we grow to love them for the weight of their human errors. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Cloth boards with gilt lettering. Clean, copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A collection of short stories.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth stamped in b&w on the front color, gilt lettering on the spine. Robinson (1833-1900) was a noted Quaker author from a well-respected and artistic Vermont family whose writings and art captured the dialect, culture and time of pre-Civil War Vermont, set in the imaginary town of Danvis, largely drawing from his the inhabitants and experiences of Ferrisburgh, VT. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 197 pages. Slight wear and creasing to dust jacket, some foxing to top edge, else a very nice, tight copy protected by mylar cover. The author's third book, an amusing collection of satiric sketches. 20 stories beginning with 'Walt and Will' a freewheeling version of the creation of the Disney empire. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1985, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light fading to spine. INSCRIBED BY MORRIS on the half-title page. The author's third book.

Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers, reprint, 1836, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue textured cloth with decorative gilt title on spine. Vol. 2 ONLY of a ten volume set. This book combines the 3rd and 4th volumes in the original 18 volume set. 213 + 238 pages. Frontis. engraving and illustrated title page reprinted from the 1832 edition. This collection of moral tales written by Maria Edgeworth explores themes of education, family relationships, and social issues in 19th century Ireland. The stories are entertaining and engaging while also providing valuable lessons about life and morality. Edgeworth was a significant figure in the development of the novel as a literary form and her work is still widely read and admired today. Solid binding, mild foxing. Previous owner's name on title page.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 213 pages. Light bump to lower edge of spine, else a lovely copy of the author's first book. Blurbs by Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, Wright Morris & Larry Woiwode on back cover.

Hardcover. NY, Horizon Press, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 252 pages. A collection of short stories. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Shoemaker & Hoard, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. That Distant Land brings together twenty-three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berrys mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations. This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. "With The Angel on the Roof, acclaimed author Russell Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering, 274 pages. B&w decorations by Lois Lenski. A nice selection of Canadian stories. Bookplate on inside front cover, otherwise a bright, clean copy.

Softcover. Louisville KY, Sarabande Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 202 pages. If it's possible to be dubbed a "master storyteller" this early in one's career, then Leung's enchanting debut short story collection most assuredly has earned him the title. As diverse as they are similar, Leung's characters and their conditions run the gamut from elderly widower to precocious youngsters, porn star to AIDS victim, serial killer to estranged sisters, and all are lucidly portrayed in prose that is achingly lyrical and elegantly refined. Leung's stories are startling in their depth and intricacy. INSCRIBED BY LEUNG on the half-title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. First published in Norway in 2004, Knots is Gunnhild Oyehaug's radical collection of short stories that range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds. In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Oyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud's thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. Clean copy.

Softcover. Union City CA, Fault Publications, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Unpaginated, but 48 pages, illustrations by Susan Seeley Hay. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the dedication page. A collection of short stories. Clean copy.

Softcover. Taipei, Bookman Books, reprint, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 242 pages. An expanded edition of a book first published in 1983. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Riverhead Books, 1st US, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The secrets people kept, the lies they told. In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another, and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatory men. Ireland's folklore and politics loom large, and poverty, emotional and material, seeps through every crack. By an award-winning Irish writer, her second book. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, George H. Doran, 1st, 1914, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray paper-covered boards with titles stamped in gilt. Orange and white pictorial paste-on cover. Orange and white pictorial endpapers. 36 illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg. Includes a section of Flagg illustrations spoofing other contemporary colleagues in their styling, including Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, Charles Dana Gibson, among others. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Westvaco Corporation, Ltd. Ed., 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 194 pages, Bound in light brown cloth with gilt lettering on the spine and gilt decoration on the covers. In a pictorial cardboard slipcase illustrated with Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley painted by Paul Cezanne. When In Our Time was first published in 1925, it was widely praised for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and earned Hemingway a place among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories Indian Camp and The Three Day Blow, and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose, enlivened by an ear for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic. His writing suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of vision. Limited Edition, privately published by Westvaco. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st US, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 211 pages. The author's first collection of short stories, ten stories which explore the British experience of France over a period of 300 years, from the 17th century to the present. Remainder mark to bottom edge, else a beautiful copy,

Softcover. Ann Arbor MI, Ardis Publishers, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 430 pages. Clean, bright copy. Contents: The Steel Bird by Vasily Aksenov, Snowball Berry Red by Vasily Shukshin, A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov, The Exchange by Yury Trifonov, Life in Windy Weather by Andrei Bitov, Belshazzar's Feasts by Fazil Iskander, Downstream by Valentin Rasputin.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow & Co., 1st US, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Translated by Marc Romano. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, George H. Doran, 2nd pr., 1924, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, 302 pages. Early American edition ("B" on copyright and no publisher's colophon). Interconnected short stories, and basis for a 1931 film of the same name, directed by Louis Mercanton. "The author calls his book 'a tapestry of the fortunes, follies, adventures, gallantries of a certain lovely lady and her friends and companions in this tale.' ... Mischievousness, then, is the delicate and all-important ingredient in this account of some fashionables of Mayfair." A collection of interconnected short stories (a few with fantasy/horror elements), it was published in England in 1923, a year before Arlen's sensational best-seller "The Green Hat," which vaulted him to international fame and fortune. Lacks dust jacket, name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Covici-Friede, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket with pieces gone from spine and rear panel. 323 pages. Nice First Edition of this uncommon anthology. Bound in publisher's original back cloth with titles in gilt on front board and spine. Square, tight and clean throughout with little wear. A touch of bumping to the heel. Spine gilt bright. Attractive unclipped dust-jacket, ($2.50),

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean copy. A collection of short stories which illuminate, with imagery and humor, the darkest corners of the American soul. The author attempts to capture the personalities of rural America, shaped by poverty, cruelty and an odd compassion.

Softcover. Freedom CA, Crossing Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 150 pages. The author's second book. In 10 astute, mildly zany and often wickedly funny stories, Kirshenbaum peers at a multifaceted assortment of modern relationships. A wife who decides to organize her life by making lists of "Things to Do" discovers she married not for love, but for a good health plan. If you are a woman with a past, there is no point to an attachment with a man who thinks only of the future, according to "Past Perfect." Reality may encompass a gray Honda Civic in suburban Connecticut, but to the narrator of "Wheels," true love is a sleek, cobalt-blue Alfa Romeo on the open road. "Pravda" describes two women, friends of many years, who spend a fall afternoon outdoors on a bench discussing Marxism, men and amorality. An American couple who have come to Romania in search of romance to save their marriage find only "Travail"; the highlight of their vacation is the sight of three stuffed goats in pink tutus.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 168 pages. In these 14 short stories, the author "displays the inimitable wit and the astonishing stylistic command that have set him at the forefront of American writing today." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The three stories in The Farmer's Daughter display a writer whose gift is in full flower. The title novella is the uncompromising, heartbreaking tale of Sarah, a home-schooled fifteen-year old girl recently transplanted by her somewhat oblivious parents to rural Montana, who is learning that the world is larger than her fundamentalist mother wants her to know. In the rapture of playing music, riding her horse, and enjoying the natural world, Sarah searches for clues to understand her own coming of age. But when her mother runs off with another man, the girl is left to deal with an act of unexpected brutality that will test her faith in the world she is starting to embrace. In Brown Dog Redux, Harrison shifts to the lighter side. The beloved recurring character Brown Dog is killing time in Toronto where he's fled to save his adopted daughter, Berry, from being locked in an institution. But Toronto has run out of welcome and BD, still looking for love, enlists the help of an unexpected benefactor to sneak Berry back into the States on the tour bus of an Indian rock band called Thunderskins, with riotously funny results. Harrison's final tale, Games of Night, is the witty, ribald, and occasionally harrowing memoir of a retired werewolf in contemporary times. Misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder brought on by the bite of a Mexican hummingbird, he attempts to lead a normal life, but is nevertheless plagued by hazy, feverish episodes of epic lust, physical appetite, athletic exertions, and outbursts of violence under the full moon. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Includes The Steinway Quintet, Music of the Spheres and the Magic Flute. By the author of Pinto and Sons, King of the Jews and other fiction. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, One World/Ballantine, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The author's debut stunning collection of seventeen interconnected short stories set in the urban and exotic locales of New York City and Brazil. In dazzling, jazz-like prose

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1990, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR on the title page spread. In his first collection of stories, Ralph Lombreglia writes about being young and unsettled, about trying to connect and not always making it - or succeeding in startling ways. Original, at times whimsical, the stories, some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic , are deft and biting entertainment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Zoland Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of short stories, most of them set in Indiana, focuses on the meddling of fact and fiction and includes a dozen satiric - but also sympathetic - tales written in the persona of Indiana's famous son, Dan Quayle. Clean copy.