Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice, unclipped dust jacket with light tanning to spine. 290 pages plus index. Clean copy. THE ENLIGHTENMENT has long been the victim of uninformed or hostile criticisms. Even so respected a source as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as "shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition," thus collecting in one sentence most of our current prejudices. In this provocative book--at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic--Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot--to the esteem they deserve.
Softcover. Seattle, Wave Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 219 pages. A collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares 'I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.' Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde-among many others-into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet's need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 450 pages. Map endpapers. Ever since the appearance of his groundbreaking The Question of Palestine, Edward Said has been America's most outspoken advocate for Palestinian self-determination. As these collected essays amply prove, he is also our most intelligent and bracingly heretical writer on affairs involving not only Palestinians but also the Arab and Muslim worlds and their tortuous relations with the West. In The Politics of Dispossession Said traces his people's struggle for statehood through twenty-five years of exile, from the PLO's bloody 1970 exile from Jordan through the debacle of the Gulf War and the ambiguous 1994 peace accord with Israel. As frank as he is about his personal involvement in that struggle, Said is equally unsparing in his demolition of Arab icons and American shibboleths. Stylish, impassioned, and informed by a magisterial knowledge of history and literature, The Politics of Dispossession is a masterly synthesis of scholarship and polemic that has the power to redefine the debate over the Middle East. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2003, Two hardcovers in dust dackets with sunning to spines, 479 and 493 pages. Andrew Marvell (1621-78) is best known today as the author of a handful of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems. In his own time, however, Marvell was famous for his brilliant prose interventions in the major issues of the Restoration, religious toleration, and what he called "arbitrary" as distinct from parliamentary government. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell's prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context. Four major scholars of the Restoration era have collaborated to produce this truly Anglo-American edition. From the Rehearsal Transpros'd, a serio-comic best-seller which appeared with tacit permission from Charles II himself, through the documentary Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, Marvell established himself not only as a model of liberal thought for the eighteenth century but also as an irresistible new voice in political polemic, wittier, more literary, and hence more readable than his contemporaries. Name, date on front fly leafs, otherwise clean. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. Edinburgh/London, William Blackwood and Sons, 1st thus, 1893, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, 187 pages plus publisher's catalog in rear. "Carefully Re-Edited, with Sketches never before published." Mainly a reprint of Hawker's contributions to "Notes and Queries", "Household Words", "All the Year Round". Frontis. photo of Morwenstow Church, protected by tissue guard. Also pasted to inside front cover a clipping of two photos: Hawker and his second wife, taken about the time of their marriage.
Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 254 pages. The collected short stories and autobiographical writings of the last survivor of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties describes growing up in Boston's black middle class, her relationship with Langston Hughes, and other subjects.
Hardcover. Albuquerque NM, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 217 pages. Includes essays on William Everson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Nathaniel Tarn, Thom Gunn and more. Notes, bibliography. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 192 pages. Through the distillation of a lifetime of experiences, John Hay describes in The Undiscovered Country his quiet, profound search for our place in the natural world. In considering snails, alewives, terns, woodland moths, and other forms of natural life, Hay shares with his readers a discovery that few have experienced and no one has written about so eloquently. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dustjacket. An enthralling collection of nonfiction essays on a myriad of topics--from art and artists to dreams, myths, and memories--observed in #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman's probing, amusing, and distinctive style. An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his bestselling fiction. Now, The View from the Cheap Seats brings together for the first time ever more than sixty pieces of his outstanding nonfiction. Analytical yet playful, erudite yet accessible, this cornucopia explores a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts the author's experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards in Hollywood.
Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Limited to 504 signed copies, this being no 265. Bound in original publishers quarter vellum, with green cloth boards, vellum dusty, cloth faded. An anthology of the author's writings from 1921 to 1930. The work concerns the history of an unnamed fictional village, and is divided into alternating chapters with different headings. Vellum-backed cloth, lettered in gold at the spine and with Williamson's familiar owl logo gold-stamped to the upper board. With a portrait frontispiece and two brief sketches by the author. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Some uneven fading to the cloth and a little darkening to the vellum backstrip, as is common with this production.
Hardcover. NY, New Directions Books, 1st, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with black title on spine. Collected stories and essays "not for readers who hate to think," Mild shelf wear, clean.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 341 pages. This is the first collection of essays in seven years by the author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Fiction and the Figures of Life. In it, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 524 pages. The finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage by V.S. Naipaul - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume spanning some forty years of travel and sustained meditations on our world. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 305 pages. In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In a bright dust jacket. Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver.
Hardcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 200 pages. Critical essays on Charles Simic, John Ashbery, Stephen Dobyns and Charles Wright. SIGNED on title page by Stitts, also INSCRIBED on the front fly leaf by him. Personal letter from author also laid in. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 204 pages. This is a book of essays, including: On Paul Goodman, Approaching Artaud, Fascinating Fascism, Under the Sign of Saturn, Syberberg's Hitler, Remembering Barthes, and, Mind as Passion. This particular book was printed in a small initial run. 'Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004) was an American writer, film-maker, teacher, and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay 'Notes on 'Camp'', in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America. Remainder mark to top edge otherwise a tight, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of seven essays. Clean copy.
Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 8th pr., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 751 pages. -In this wide-ranging book, based on her Gifford Lectures, philosopher Nussbaum draws on philosophy, psychology, anthropology, music and literature to illuminate the role emotions play in thoughts about important goals. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1st, 1903, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth, 269 pages, frontis of author. First Printing; "Published September 1903" and 1903 date On title page. In this volume Mr. Chesterton presents nearly twenty of the ingenious and brilliant papers which delighted and puzzled the readers of the London Daily News and Speaker. The profiles are all biographical, ranging from Alfred the Great to Bret Harte. Chesterton delves into a range of subjects, including notable authors such as Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, and Byron, providing insightful commentary on their contributions to literature and thought. The opening of "Varied Types" sets the stage by discussing the complexities of biography, particularly focusing on Charlotte Bronte. Chesterton argues that external details about a person's life often overshadow the profound truths expressed in their work. Covers shelfworn, Private library bookplate on inside front cover, otherwise a clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Everyman's Library, 1st thus, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 1122 pages. Collected Nonfiction Including Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From. Introduction by John Leonard. This volume is an omnibus of Joan Didion's popular works. Clean copy.
 "The Making of a Poem by: Spender, Stephen")
 "The Party Of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment by: Peter Gay")
 "The Poetics of Wrongness by: Rachel Zucker")
 "THE POLITICS OF DISPOSSESSION The Struggle for Palestinian Self Determination 1969-1994 by: Said, Edward W.")
 "The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (Two Volumes) by: Marvell, Andrew/ Editors: Dzelzainis, Martin, Patterson, Annabel")
 "The Prose Works of Rev R S Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstow Including Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall by: Hawker, R. S. (Rev.)")
 "The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian by: Wright, Louis B {Edited by}")
 "The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences by: Dorothy West")
 "The Sun Is But a Morning Star: Studies in West Coast Poetry and Poetics by: Lee Bartlett")
 "The Undiscovered Country by: Hay, John")
 "The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by: Gaiman, Neil")
 "The Village Book (SIGNED COPY) by: Williamson, Henry")
 "The Wisdom Of The Heart by: Henry Miller")
 "The World Within The Word: Essays by: Gass, William H.")
 "The Writer and the World: Essays by: Naipaul, V.S.")
 "This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings by: William Styron")
 "Travels in Hyperreality: Essays by: Eco, Umberto")
 "Uncertainty & Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets (SIGNED COPY) by: Stitt, Peter")
 "Under the Sign of Saturn by: Sontag, Susan")
 "Under the Sign of Saturn by: Sontag, Susan")
 "Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by: Martha C. Nussbaum")
 "Varied Types by: Chesterton, G. K.")
 "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by: Joan Didion")