literature

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 321 pages with an index. Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers. The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. Clean copy.

NY, Grove Press, 1st US, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 404 pages. Acclaimed novel based on the life of botanic artist William Buelow Gould (1801-53). In this account, Gould is a white convict condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1828 and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer and forger, falls in love with a black woman and discovers too late that to love is not safe. The book's design features colour reproductions of Gould's original art work, and each chapter is printed in a different colour ink. The book has been awarded the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize and Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal, and the Australian Publisher's Association 2002 Joyce Thorpe Nicholson Best Designed Book of the Year. Clean copy

Hardcover. San Marino CA, The Huntington Library, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 326 pages, b&w illustrations. Early modern European governments and their subjects had difficulty agreeing to laws governing behavior on the sea - an environment that featured watery borders, rampant piracy, the threat of free trade, and the large-scale transportation of human cargo. The essays in this volume explore how the exploitation of the oceans changed the institution of slavery, long-distance trade, property crime, the environment, literature, and memory from medieval times to the nineteenth century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed boards, 205 pages. Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. Light scratch top rear cover, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. San Francisco, Pomegranate, Revised Ed., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 168 pages. Many cans of tuna have been opened and emptied since the collection's first mostly black-and-white edition, in 1981; the revised edition adds more color art as well as coverage of classics including The Cat in the Hat, Bill the Cat, and pets penned by B. Kliban and Edward Gorey. The volume covers cartoon depictions of the cat dating back to 1100 B.C., though the bulk of the images date to the 20th century. Brief essays about printing, literature, contemporary society, and other historical facts are interspersed with the goods selections from the comics themselves. Editor Whyte is a publisher who founded the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

Softcover. San Francisco, Pomegranate, Revised Ed., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 168 pages. Many cans of tuna have been opened and emptied since the collection's first mostly black-and-white edition, in 1981; the revised edition adds more color art as well as coverage of classics including The Cat in the Hat, Bill the Cat, and pets penned by B. Kliban and Edward Gorey. The volume covers cartoon depictions of the cat dating back to 1100 B.C., though the bulk of the images date to the 20th century. Brief essays about printing, literature, contemporary society, and other historical facts are interspersed with the goods selections from the comics themselves. Editor Whyte is a publisher who founded the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 558 pages. Edited by Ian T. Macauley. An anthology of futuristic nonfiction essays by the best-selling author of 2001: A Space Odyssey spans more than sixty years of work in a collection, organized chronologically, that includes his prophetic predictions about geosynchronous satellites, space travel, and the Internet. Light sunning to spine, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. London, Vision Press Limited, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket, 240 pages. A full critical analysis of Grass' plays, poems and novels and viewed in the context of 20th century German literature. No markings.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 349 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Baker and Taylor, 1st, 1910, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 348 pages. Contains some black & white illustrations and color frontispiece with tissue-guard. Green cloth covers with gold lettering and decoration. Color illustration pasted on front cover. Gilt top edge. Light rubbing to front cover, corners, spine. Both hinges starting to crack.

Softcover. NY, Little, Brown & Company, reprint, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 332 pages. Fargo has spent his life engaging in almost every vice imaginable--and his only regret is that he once stole a horse. His son Grant, a shiftless dandy with a resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, is conducting an affair with his voluptuous and volatile cousin. And behind everyone's back, Grandmother Pearl has just signed the family property over to the Almighty. In the literature of the American prairie, few families are as brawling, as benighted, or as outrageously vital as the Fargos of Verdon, Nebraska. And when Jim Thompson chronicles their life and times, the result suggest Willa Cather steeped in rotguut--and armed with a .45. Clean, unread copy.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 572 pages. The author as written an admirable book that pulls no punches in recounting Hellman and Hammett's flaboyant lives and compulsions. like new in a protective brodart.

Softcover. Sarasota FL, Pineapple Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages. Follow Ernest Hemingway's exploits on the Bahamian island of Bimini from 1935 to 1937, the very moment in time when the International Game Fish Association (under the author's co-leadership) was emerging. Covers Hemingway's role in the formation of the IGFA, his underappreciated seminal writing about competitive saltwater angling when the sport was still in its infancy, the amazing fishing he enjoyed on the island, and the way all of these experiences translated into the composition of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. This is the only book on this period in Hemingway's life and reveals unexpected dimensions to the Hemingway portrait that deserve attention, including his surprising humor, his advanced conservationist views several decades before the environmental movement even began, and his egalitarian ideas about his contemporary female counterparts in the big-game fishing world--challenging the usual portrait of Hemingway as a chauvinist with no personal rules, boundaries, or conscience. Includes beautiful vintage photographs of 1930s Bimini that have never been published in book form.

Softcover. Waitsfield VT, Vermont Crossroads Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, b&w illustrations. Originally published in hardcover in 1966. Harbor Springs in northern Michigan was where the Hemingway family vacationed from Chicago as early as 1900, when Ernest was age 1. Trips there followed during his youth and into his early years as a professional writer. The setting of Walloon Lake and the region and characters of Little Traverse Bay found their way into some of his stories. Includes three of Hemingway's short stories originally published in the Oak Park (Ill. ) High School Tabula, here reprinted for the first time. Mild wear, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 455 pages. This biography of Henry Thoreau offers insight into his social activism, his interest in fine arts, William Gilpin and John Ruskin's influence on his nature writing, and his involvement in, and influence by, the Agassiz-Darwin debate over "The Origin of Species." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, silver lettering, 152 pages. Light pencil marking in text.

Hardcover. Prague, Twisted Spoon Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly soiled dust jacket, 150 pages. B&w frontis. The works of the Czech Symbolist Otokar Brezina (1868-1929), a writer twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, influenced an entire generation of artists in Bohemia and Moravia. Hidden History (published posthumously in 1935) is one of the most important works of 20th century Czech prose and represents the apotheosis of Brezina's endeavors in the essay form. In this finely crafted collection, he discusses the role of art as a vanguard of developments in science and as a force for social change. These essays also contribute to an understanding of Brezina's poetry, for which he is better known. They comprise the most systematic exposition of his aesthetic creed, which served to inspire the Czech writers and literary critics who followed in his footsteps. This edition is the first complete English translation of any complete volume of Brezina's work. Afterword by Petr Holman. Light foxing, no markings.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages, a facsimile reprint of his fantastic tales first published in 1785. Horatio Walpole, also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. His literary reputation rests on his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. "The Hieroglyphic Tales were undoubtedly written a little before the creation of the world, and have ever since been preserved, by oral tradition, in the mountains of Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet discovered. Of these few facts we could have the most authentic attestations of several clergymen, who remember to have heard them repeated by old men long before they, the said clergymen, were born." (From Walpole's own ntroduction). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott , 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 251 pages. Hal Borland writes about his boyhood as part of a homesteading family in Eastern Colorado. A nice copy of the first edition, as stated on the copyright page. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 355 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics.