books literature

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Books, 2nd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 625 pages, b&w illustrations. The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books. Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls-the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser-the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series-masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder's biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Mild wrinkle to page 243. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Knopf, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 219 pages. Clean, bright copy. "I doubt very much that I'm the only person who's finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields's own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can't name a more necessary or a more thrilling book.

Hardcover. NY, DK, 1st US, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages, lavishly illustrated in color throughout. "A beautiful and enthralling guide to more than 80 of the world's most celebrated, rare, and important written works, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Anne Frank's diary. Including handwritten illuminated manuscripts, seminal printed volumes, and some of the greatest examples of illustrated literature, each exquisite chapter charts both the evolution and the legacy of every landmark book profiled." Clean, bright copy.

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.

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.

Hardcover. Lexington Books , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glazed boards, 299 pages. John McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. McWilliams provides close readings of some twenty historical novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions established by Scott's Waverley novels, showing both the continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott's narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of McWilliams's perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and achievement. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st US, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 122 pages. Advance Readers Copy. 'A great Russian novel in the grand Russian tradition' - LE FIGARO. Years after the death of their beloved son, there is a knock at the door of Nikolai and Vera's apartment. Introducing himself simply as 'Sergeant Bertrand', the unknown visitor triggers a precipitous journey into the depths of the human soul. Hailed as an early masterpiece of post-Soviet literature, Russian Gothic is now available in English for the first time. Three decades after it was written, its complex portrait of grief, misogyny, violence and love is as fresh, shocking and relevant as ever. Aleksandr Skorobogatov was born in Grodno in what is now Belorussia. He is one of the most original Russophone writers of the post-communist era. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Includes a bibliography of Bannerman's books and 47 reproductions of the first British and first American editions and her illustrations for them. Phyllis Yuill and Justin Schiller helped with the publishing history and supplied illustrations. Hay shows that it was the illustrations of later artists that provoked the controversy over THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, not Bannerman's original text or pictures. Bound in the original gilt-stamped red boards. From the dust jacket: "This first biography of Helen Bannerman covers much new ground and is based on the vast collection of letters to the children, usually lovingly illustrated, in the possession of the Bannerman family. As well as telling the story of one of the most popular children's books of all time, Elizabeth Hay's biography offers an intimate picture of the daily life of a British memsahib in the heyday of the Raj." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Nevada City NV, Underwood Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 112 pages illustrated in color. Showcases the popular period illustration which prefigured and helped create the violent visual language in today's popular aboveground cinema, comic books, and ultra-violent multi-million copy video games. Featuring full-page illustrations by pulp artists Walter Baumhofer, Rafael de Soto, Margaret Brundage, Jerome Rozen, Virgil Finlay, Norman Saunders, H.J. Ward, Harold McCauley, Austin Briggs, Emsh and others, this beautifully produced full-color collection documents Depression-era masculine violence, in fantasy and reality, as depicted on the covers of popular literature. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 490 pages. By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines. Clean copy.

Softcover. Calcutta/Chicago, Seagull/University of Chicago, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, flexible cloth in a bright dust jacket. An elaborate catalog published by Seagull Books, a venture begun in Kolkata in 1982 by Naveen Kishore, a theater practitioner. They focus on world and Indian literature in English translation, serious non-fiction, culture studies, performance studies, art and cinema. 372 pages illustrated in color. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 867 pages. Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific or more exposed than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published most for the first time in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Compiled by Mailer s authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer features the most fascinating of Mailer s missives from 1940 to 2007 letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. "In 'Shakespeare After All,' Marjorie Garber - professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University gives us a magisterial work of criticism, authoritative and engaging, based on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years. Richly informed by Shakespearean scholarship of the latter half of the twentieth century, this book offers passionate and revealing readings of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays in chronological sequence". 989 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Faber and Faber, Uncorrected proof, 1970, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 81 pages, b&w drawings by Karen Usborne, INSCRIBED BY WILSON to Irving and Joyce (Adler) on the title page and dated August 1970. Wilson has also added 3 titles to the list of his previously published books on the opposite page. Joyce Adler wrote several books on Caribbean literature and Harris. She has marked up this book in pencil and pen with underlining and marginal notes. This edition published before the hardcover printing. Peach color wrappers faded..

Hardcover. NY, ZE Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with white lettering. No dust jacket issued. With Stay, acclaimed poet, artist, and bestselling memoirist Nick Flynn presents a self-portrait via a constellation of topics that have circled his work. Ranging from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships, Stay is a mixed-media retrospective that shows nothing is created in isolation. Mirroring Flynn's life, this work of visual and literary memoir is populated by examples of his collaborations since the 1980s with such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, filmmaker Paul Weitz, and artists John Baldessari, Marilyn Minter, and Bill Shuck. In Flynn's refusal to conform to narrative or the safety of his own perspective, Stay grasps for an essential truth, an answer to what art, in the end, can and cannot reflect. Illustrated in color, b&w.

Softcover. Washington, Library of Congress, 1st thus, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages, illustrations in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

Softcover. Oakland CA, PM Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. Sticking It to the Man tracks the ways in which the changing politics and culture of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were reflected in pulp and popular fiction in the United States, the UK, and Australia. Featuring more than three hundred full-color covers, the book includes in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, articles, and reviews from more than two dozen popular culture critics and scholars. Among the works explored, celebrated, and analyzed are books by street-level hustlers turned best-selling black writers Iceberg Slim, Nathan Heard, and Donald Goines; crime heavyweights Chester Himes, Ernest Tidyman, and Brian Garfield; Yippies Anita Hoffman and Ed Sanders; best-selling authors such as Alice Walker, Patricia Nell Warren, and Rita Mae Brown; and a myriad of lesser-known novelists ripe for rediscovery.

Hardcover. Milan, Mondadori, 1st, 1945, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 6 unnumbered pages including the inside of both covers. Publisher's thick pictorial boards backed in white cloth-patterned paper & saddle stapled. Lightly soiled, edges slightly rubbed, otherwise very good. A nice example with all flaps and concealed color illustrations in perfect working order. Three stories of birds each with it's own open-the-flap text and graphic art. Laid in is a typed English translation of the text. Bruno Munari was "one of the most celebrated names in twentieth century Italy in graphic designing who fundamentally altered the landscape of many fields of visual arts, futurism and modernism He is credited for his contribution to industrial design, sculpture, painting, literature, film and concrete art." A collector's copy of this scarce title.

Hardcover. NY, Dial Books, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 300 pages, b&w illustrations. The children's book author has won the Newberry Medal and National Book Award. Now in these fascinating stories from her life, she reveal the origins of her book characters from events in her life; from China with missionary parents to single life in Japan to life in Maryland with four children. Filled with personal photos and letters. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Arno Press, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, lavendar cloth stamped in white, 155 pages.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 447 pages, b&w illustrations. Sylvia Beach ran a bookshop in Paris in the 1920s and 30s and was at the heart of the literary world there which also included Hemingway, Pound, Flanner, Gide, and of course Joyce whose novel "Ulysses" she published. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Carey, Lea & Carey, Second series, 1829, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Vol 1: 296 pages. Vol 2: 286 pagesHardcovers. Brown boards, paste down title on spine in black. Original owner inscription on front flyleaf of both books, original owner's signature on back pages. Pages untrimmed, rough edged, tanning and foxing to pages. Binding very good, spine straight. Agewear throughout, in very good condition for its age. Good solid volumes of Sir Walter Scott's tales as told to his grandson.

Softcover. NY, New York Review Books, 1st US., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 488 pages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, French aristocratic society developed an art of living based on a refined code of good manners. Conversation, which began as a way of passing time, eventually became the central ritual of social life. In the salons, freed from the rigidity of court life, it was women who dictated the rules and presided over exchanges among socialites, writers, theologians, and statesmen. They contributed decisively to the development of the modern French language, new literary forms, and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas. With a cast of characters both famous and unknown, ranging from the Marquise de Rambouillet to Madame De Stael was a, and including figures like Ninon de Lenclos, the Marquise de Sevigne, and Madame de Lafayette, as well as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Diderot, and Voltaire, Benedetta Craveri traces the history of this worldly society that carried the art of sociability to its supreme perfection-and ultimately helped bring on the Revolution that swept it all away. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 320 pages illustrated in color by Liew. "Liew's graphic novel is a fascinating look at a cartoonist's growth over time and how his creative output reflects the culture around him, and Liew tells Chye's story in a way that only comic books can....A beautifully multidimensional portrait of the cartoonist, beginning with Chye's personal interpretation o the past before showing comics and sketches that provide further insight....The color palettes, the paper quality, the incorporation of photographs and sketches, they all combine with the text to provide a complex view of Charlie Chan Hock Chye that has a strong sense of history behind it." A 2017 Eisner Award Winner for Best Writer/Artist, Best US Edition of International Material--Asia, and Best Publication DesignWinner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2016A New York Times bestsellerAn Economist Book of the Year 2016An NPR Graphic Novel Pick for 2016A Washington Post Best Graphic Novel of 2016A New York Post Best Books of 2016A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016