Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton and Co., 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 346 pages. John Randolph of Roanoke, the notorious Virginian congressman and senator, was as renowned for his eccentric behavior as for his unusual political positions. Frontispiece portrait. Clean copy.
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.
Hardcover. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1st UK, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket with pieces gone, 229 pages plus index. A study of the controversial period in America which followed the Civil War examining the political situation in the South.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 256 pages. In this unique blend of historical fiction and cutting-edge suspense, author Diane Wei Liang succeeds in delivering an incredible mystery veiled behind the red curtain of contemporary Chinese life and culture. Set in Beijing "The Eye of Jade" introduces readers to the enigmatic Mei Wang, the country's first successful female private investigator, and her struggle to uncover the location of a rare and treasured artifact that is believed to have been absconded from the Luoyang Museum during the Cultural Revolution. For Wang this is a task of special importance, and can only stand to make her later life and reputation glimmer, but as she soon finds in the back alleys, this is not going to be easy. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 248 pages. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Harper Torchbooks, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 357 pages. A scholarly study about life in the Old South. Clean copy.
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.
Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 396 pages including index. By focusing on the Howe brothers, their political connections, their relationships with the British ministry, their attitude toward the Revolution, and their military activities in America, Gruber answers the frequently asked question of why the British failed to end the American Revolution in its early years. This book supersedes earlier studies because of its broader research and because it elucidates the complex personal interplay between Whitehall and its commanders. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. Uncommon post-apocalyptic novel set in the near future and "focussing on a few people brought into unnatural intimacy after an atomic bomb has been dropped on New York. Each of the characters is intended to be symbolic of forces let loose in the world by atomic fission. Chunks gone from edges of dj, spine faded. Interior of book is clean.
Softcover. Lewiston ID, Confluence Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. This chapbook is clean and unmarked in very good condition. Unpaginated. Limited edition of 500 copies.
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.
Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, Book Club, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 502 pages. Bookplate on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Hanover NH, University Press of New England, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 225 pages. SIGNED BY MITCHELL on the title page. Three Vermont women enroll in a nature writing class, only to find themselves drawn into a plot to commit an act of destruction in the name of the environment. Clean copy.
Softcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 358 pages with index. In The Power of the Purse, E. James Ferguson examines the intricate financial history of the American Revolution and the Confederation and connects it to political and constitutional developments in the period. Whether states or Congress should pay the debts of the Revolution and collect the taxes was a pivotal question whose solution would largely determine the country's progress toward national union. Ultimately, says Ferguson, the Revolutionary debt fulfilled an important purpose as a "bond of union." Ferguson's masterful analysis has become a classic among the literature on the American Revolution. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 142 pages. This volume covers the voyage, a few days less than a year in duration, of the clipper ship Sea Serpent around the world in 1854-55, from New York to New York by way of Cape Horn, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. One of the crew, Hugh McCulloch Gregory, better educated than the average seaman of his day, kept a journal in which he made daily entries of events on board.
Hardcover. London, Allen Lane, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989. Uwe Tellkamp was born in 1968 in Dresden. After completing his military service, he lost his place to study medicine on the grounds of 'political sabotage'. He was arrested in 1989, but went on to study medicine in Liepzig, Dresden and New York, later becoming a surgeon. He has won numerous regional prizes for poetry, as well as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for The Sleep in the Clocks. In 2008, he won the German Book Prize for The Tower. Two lines underlined in Preface, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Dayton OH, Morningside Bookshop, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 338 pages, b&w illustrations. Reprint of 1957 Edition. "Mr. Pullen...has gone to the letters, diaries and memoirs of the participants with the thoroughness and care of a good historian...He can also describe battle action with much distinction, his account of the 20th's fight at Gettysburg is as good a piece of battle writing as you are likely to find anywhere." - Bruce Catton. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Baker & Taylor Company, 2nd pr., 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Decorated olive cloth covers with titles in black in ruled border. Titles on spine in orange. 396 pages. Five black & white illustrations plus frontispiece with tissue guard by F.R. Gruger. Bookseller's label on front end paper. Rubbing to corners and spine. Otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 425 pages. Based his work primarily on official documents released during the 1970s Yale historian Gregg Herken makes clear how, and why, after World War II American diplomats tried-but failed- to make the nation's nuclear monopoly an advantage in negotiating with the Soviet Union. And why Truman's advisers wrongly predicted that a Soviet bomb was a generation away. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
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.
Hardcover. Seattle, Wave Books, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 49 pages. She is often obscure, but her allusions are as much a sign of camaraderie as of scholarly pretension, her poems a pert crystallization impossible in more narrative poetry," The New Yorker. Caroline Knox once again demonstrates that she is a master at lyrical billiards, sending all levels of diction in surprising and comedic directions. No subject matter is off-limits for her examination. Her vast range of experiment is exciting, and the ensuing poems are games, dreams, and riddles. This collection is art on the page for the eye and the ear. Clean copy.
Softcover. Newport RI, Naval War College Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 419 pages. Naval War College Historical Monograph Series No. 11. Collection of papers by naval historians on the state of international maritime history in the 1990;s. Includes footnotes, chapter bibliographies, Illustrated with b&w charts & tables. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Macmillan Company, 1st, 1914, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 164 pages plus 5 pages of publisher's ads. Remnants of torn dust jacket laid in at rear. From reviews on flap: "An effective presentation of modern life in New York City" ... "One of the most sparkling comedies of recent years, depicting life among the artists in Manhattan..." One of only two plays written by this poet. Clean copy.