books literature

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages. Joyce Cary long a popular author among discriminating readers, is gaining a wider audience for his novels every year. This critical study of his work considers the developing relationship between his matter and his manner. It especially emphasizes his growth as artist and thinker. Looking closely at the language and structure of Cary's books, the author examines all the novels- the African ones, the historical ones, and the two trilogies most of them in detail. To gain an overall view he also considers Cary's nonfiction and some as yet unpublished material. While this study is essentially non-biographical, it does analyze Cary's interpretations of history, sociology and politics as they are gathered from the actions and words of his colorful characters. One of the most intriguing features of Dr. Wolkenfeld's book is the dialogue between characters of the various novels, where likenesses as well as dissimilarities, which reveal so much about Cary as a writer, become evident. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Powerhouse Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 240 pages, color illustrations. The history of American comics through the stories of comics' most important and influential creators -- tracing the medium's journey all the way from its beginnings as junk culture for kids to its current status as legitimate literature and pop culture. Featuring artists such as Jerry Siegel, Will Eisner, Jerry Robinson, Al Jaffee, Neal Adams, Peter Kuper, Stan Lee and many more.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st transl. thus, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 199 pages. This classic of German literature--often hailed as the inception of European modernist prose--follows the mental breakdown of an 18th-century schizophrenic playwright, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Published after Buchner's death, Lenz provides a taut case study of three weeks in the life of schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the "inside" of insanity. An early experiment in docufiction, Buchner's textual montage draws on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, the Alsatian pastor who briefly took care of Lenz in 1778, while also refracting Goethe's memoir of his troubled friendship with the playwright. English versions of both these historical source texts here accompany Lenz for the first time in this bilingual presentation. Based on the best recent edition of the text, this fresh translation will allow readers to discover why Heiner Muller pronounced Lenz the inaugural example of "21st-century prose." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, 1st Ed., 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with a short closed tears. B&w photos, 297 pages. The first comprehensive intellectual biography of the Georgia writer, Lillian Smith, based on an extensive collection of autobiographical writings and correspondence, as well as on Smith's published books and articles. Smith is best known as an early critic of racial segregation and as a civil rights worker.

Hardcover. New York , Frederick A. Stokes, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 197 pages illustrated in b&w by Dick Rose. INSCRIBED BY LEAF on the front fly leaf. Leaf went on to write a number of successful children's books, including Ferdinand the Bull. Two-color dust jacket with light edgewear, chipping.

Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 2nd pr., 1947, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in light tan cloth with red lettering to the spine, 361 pages. Although the life of London runs like a thread through the whole fabric of this book, it is not essentially a book about London. Life in Bloomsbury is but the center of a large circle, the point around which the rest of the book revolves, the origin of a disarming commentary on an infinite variety of topics - on Bloomsbury's squares, on the picturesqueness of London a generation ago, on what is true Cockney, on the differences of English and American humor, on the decay of English wit, on books and authors and publishers and the Press, on the literary lions of the past, on the religion of speed, on the charm of Americans, on how the Victorian age was neither so repressed nor so hidebound as most people today like to believe - and so on, one thing leading to another, like good conversation at a good luncheon overlooking the mellow squares of Bloomsbury. The book is full, too, of good stories and reminiscences, both humorous and pathetic, but there is shrewd comment besides on the deficiencies of contemporary society, not the less effective because the author knows how to soften the blow. Mild soil, sunning to covers, clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1998-10-26, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 181 pages, illustrated throughout with photos in b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. In this moving autobiography, Lois Lowry explores her rich history through personal photographs, memories, and recollections of childhood friends. Lowry's writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the opportunity to travel into the real world that is her life.

Hardcover. NY, Julian Messner, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. A memoir by the Chinese American author of many distinguished children's books. No dust-jacket issued. B&w photos, clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on one of the most provocative books in American literature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). While at work on this book, the two also conceived another less well-known but equally important book project entitled Many Are Called. This three-year photographic study of subway passengers made with a hidden camera was first published in 1966, with an introduction written by Agee in 1940. Long out of print, Many Are Called is now being reissued with a new foreword and afterword and with exquisitely reproduced images from newly prepared digital scans. Many Are Called came to fruition at a slow pace. In 1938, Walker Evans began surreptitiously photographing people on the New York City subway. With his camera hidden in his coat--the lens peeking through a buttonhole--he captured the faces of riders hurtling through the dark tunnels, wrapped in their own private thoughts. By 1940-41, Evans had made over six hundred photographs and had begun to edit the series. The book remained unpublished until 1966 when The Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of Evans's subway portraits.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Panjandrum/Aris Books, 1st, April 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages plus index, b&w photographs. Light edge wear, rubbing to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. US, Damiani, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 110 pages, softcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Absence of Subject and Two Crowns of the Egg are Somoroff's most intriguing books of photography. In this edition of Two Crowns, the still life art work is as stunning as the female nudes. Of note, the rare combinations of objects (such. books of literature, high polished knives, exquisite dishes) and life matter (such pomegranates, honey, eggs, human skulls) set one's imagination in fire. These strange image compositions are as odd as the pairing of words by Postmodern poet Giannina Braschi who writes love poems to objects, animals, beings. The scholarly introduction by art historian Donald Kuspit is respectable but a bit dry. Regardless the imagery and poetry tower over any essay that one could write about them.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st English, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 131 pages. With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life. Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky traces [tango's] fascinating journey through time and the seedy brothels and rough Argentine and European bars where the dance could be quite mannered or could spark with theatrical violence . . . Cozarinsky takes us through the ebbs and flows of the popularity of the tango, and also through a number of its evolutionary adaptive speciations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Sterling, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards with blue cloth spine, 12 pages with 6 pop-up spreads. Call me Ishmael." Three of the most famous words in all literature, they begin Herman Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Now, the epic saga of Captain Ahab's obsessive quest for the white whale comes vividly to life in this three-dimensional graphic novel, the first of its kind. This phenomenal work is the creation of multi-talented artist Sam Ita, apprentice to Robert Sabuda, one of the world's master paper engineers. Every amazing element is awe-inspiring: there's not just one pop-up per spread, but several, surrounded by colorful comic book-style panels that convey the story's drama. Some of the pops-ups are huge and incredibly detailed, like the Pequod itself, which rises gloriously from the page, complete with rigging. Others, smaller but no less wonderful, hide beneath flaps and folds. In one instance, readers actually get to look through a 3-D periscope and see Ishmael through the lens, drifting in the ocean. Clean copy w/o any flaws to paper.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 157 pages. A study of the popular English children's writer, Mrs Sherwood, 1775-1851 considering her style, writings, relations with publishers, etc. Includes reprints of The little woodman and his dog Caesar originally published: London, Houlston, 1850 and Soffrona and her cat Muff originally published: Wellington, Salop, Houlston, 1828. Includes a 38 page bibliography. "No study of nineteenth - century children's books in England can afford to ignore Mrs. Sherwood. She produced over four hundred different titles - books, tales, tracts, texts, magazines, articles in periodicals, cbapbooks, and Sunday School rewards. There is evidence that the writings of her Evangelical period, in particular, had a remarkable influence upon Victorian literature for the young.

Hardcover. Night Shade Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 439 pages. Hardcover with facsimile copy of handwritten letters to endpapers. Black cloth covered boards with iridescent titles to cover & spine. Frontispiece illustration of H. P. Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei in black & white. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Tight binding, sharp corners, clean & unmarked pages.

Softcover. NY, Zone Books, reprint, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 525 pages. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, published here as a single volume, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly non-classical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from volume one and is the first English translation of both volumes. Remainder mark top edge otherwise a clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 418 pages. A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory. In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war--and fragments of a home's sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together. Clean copy.

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.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 389 pages. Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of "true knowledge," replacing the need to exercise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper's evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology's influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, New York Review Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 448 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE. Black and white photos in center. Two pages wrinkled and stuck together in the middle of picture pages. Otherwise tight.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.

NY, Burt/Blue Ribbon Books, reprint, circa 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, light green cloth with gilt & black decorated cover and spine labels. 258 pages. Four color plates by Charles Folkard, many b&w text drawings (not credited). Dust jacket chipped and worn. states translation by May M. Sweet, but title page gives M. A. Murray as translator. The mischievous adventures of an animated marionette named Pinocchio and his father, a poor woodcarver named Geppetto. It is considered a canonical piece of children's literature and has inspired hundreds of new editions, stage plays, merchandising and movies, such as Walt Disney's iconic animated version and commonplace ideas such as a liar's long nose. No markings.