essays literature

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 274 pages. Nine lectures. Contents: Introductory; What is Meant by Tradition; The Molpe; Drama; Metre; Poetic Diction; Unity and Organic Construction; The Heroic Age; Hamlet and Orestes; Poetry; Index. Clean copy. Top of cloth spine frayed. Remnants of dust jacket laid in.

Hardcover. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, green pebbled cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 463 pages. Dust jacket worn, fading to spine with chunk gone from spine.Name and date on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare Head Press, Ltd. Ed., 1908, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Eight hardcover volumes. The complete set published in an edition of 1060 copies. This set bound in gray boards with green cloth spines. Black lettering to spines, title pages in red and black, untrimmed edges. Mild wear to boards, Vol. 6 with cracked hinges and some pencil marking, otherwise a clean set. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE AND WEIGHT, This is a heavy and oversized book and will require extra shipping. International customers please ask for a shipping quote before purchasing.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, brown cloth stamped in gilt, 222 pages with line drawings by the author. In a very worn and chipped dust jacket. "Mr. Day here sets forth in his characteristic vein his observations about men and human nature and books--talks about Humpty-Dumpty, Prometheus, Shaw, Fabre and Noah--money, the nebular hypothesis, legs, cows and marriage. Also an attempt to describe our world to a fish." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 440 pages. Black cloth, no dust jacket. The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.

Hardcover. NY, Fleming H. Revell, 1st, 1913, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt on spine and front cover, 224 pages, top edge gilt. Vermonter Humphrey was known as a prolific writer of essays with regional, nature, travel, and religious themes. The pieces in this volume were originally published in various periodicals of the period. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset and Dunlap, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A collection of essays, most previously appearing in Pageant, The New York Time, The New Republic and other publications in the 1960s. Subjects include Madison Avenue Foreign Policy, The Strange Case of Negro Superiority, Margaret Mead for President, A Solution for Leisure, among many others.

Hardcover. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 596 pages. Pieces originally published in the magazine Horizon including contributions by Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Randall Jarrell, Bertrand Russell, Paul Eluard, Edith Sitwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Hermann Hesse and many others. A 21 year history attempting to reveal the best of this publication. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Bern Porter, 1st, 1945, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. No. 260 out of 750 copies bound for distribution. 157 pages. Tan boards with wear and soiling, gray cloth spine. Shelving information on spine. Front hinge cracked. Ex-library. Printed on various colored paper, with contributions by a lot of well known authors, including Williams, Patchen, Durrell, Lamantia, many others. Edges soiled. Interior very good.

Hardcover. np, Oscar Laighton, 1st, 1935, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 177 pages. Many years ago Celia Thaxter wrote a poem adapted from one of the short stories of Count Tolstoy, she called it "The Heavenly Guest". It was later found by her granddaughter, Rosamond Thaxter, in a portfolio which had been loaned to the late Sara Orne Jewett, which was returned after her death. Also found were many unpublished papers of Celia Thaxter's. They are gathered here. This copy INSCRIBED BY ROSAMOND THAXTER on the front fly leaf, Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday and Co., 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, beige cloth with titles in black and blue on spine, no dust jacket, 317 pages. These are the life and times of Col. John R. Stingo, fabulous figure of track and ring. The Colonel who Was a raconteur In The Grand Tradition; He shares his tales Oo rainmaking, horse racing, newspaper writing; and other exploits of his long and kaleidoscopic career. Paper tanning slightly but a clean copy.

Hardcover. Pinceton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 315 pages. The Western ideal of individualism had a pervasive influence on the culture of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912). Janet Walker argues that this ideal also had an important influence on the development of the modern Japanese novel. Focusing on the work of four late Meiji writers, she analyzes their contribution to the development of a type of novel whose aim was the depiction of the modern Japanese individual. Professor Walker suggests that Meiji novels of the individual provided their readers with mirrors in which to confront their new-found sense of individuality. Her treatment of these novels as confessions allows her to discuss the development of modern Japanese literature and "the modern literary self" both in themselves and as they compare their prototypes and analogues in European literature. The author begins by examining the evolution of a literary concept of the inner self in Futabatei Shimei's novel Ukigumo (The Floating Clouds), Kitamura Tokoku's essays on the inner life, and Tayama Katai's I-novel Futon (The Quilt). She devotes the second half of her book to Shimazaki Toson, the Meiji novelist who was most influenced by the ideal of individualism. Here she traces Toson's development of a personal ideal of selfhood and analyzes in detail two examples of the lengthy confessional novel form that he created as a vehicle for its expression.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Berghahn Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 232 pages, pictorial boards. Milena Jesenska, born in Prague in 1896, is most famous as one of Franz Kafka's great loves. Although their relationship lasted only a short time, it won the attention of the literary world with the 1952 publication of Kafka's letters to Milena. Her own letters did not survive. Later biographies showed her as a fascinating personality in her own right. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944. It is estimated that Jesenska wrote well over 1,000 articles but only a handful have been translated into English. In this book her own writings provide a new perspective on her personality, as well as the changes in Central Europe between the two world wars as these were perceived by a woman of letters. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including her perceptions of Kafka, her understanding of social and cultural changes during this period, the threat of Nazism, and the plight of the Jews in the 1930s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1934, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth faded on spine and cover edges, gilt lettering on spine. 315 pages, b&w photographic plates. Some fifty essays, reviews, studies and other short pieces, including a section devoted to Williamson's travels in North America and passages from 'The Sun in the Sands' which do not appear in the 1941 book of the same name. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 309 pages. A collection of essays from the famed literary critic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY PROSE on the title page. In a brilliant, wry, and provocative book, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY/London, G. P. Putnum's Sons, 1st illust. thus, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt stamping, 242 pages. 24 woodcuts and some decorations by Tunnicliffe. First Illustrated Edition which has been enlarged by the author and contains several new essays. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 592 pages. Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era--from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup--he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, Maurice Wiles was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 1970-1991. To celebrate his seventieth birthday, a group of distinguished friends and colleagues have written this important series of original and perceptive essays on the twin themes of making and remaking Christian doctrine. The topics covered in this thought-provoking collection range from the notion of divine action in Hebrew Wisdom literature to reflections on the nature of the ministry, from the concept of God and the doctrines of Christology and of the Trinity to the character of theological reflection, and from revelation and tradition to the "lex orandi," the nature of interpretation in religion and the historical basis of theological understanding. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st pbk., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Clean, bright copy.

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.