literature

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. Cambridge MA, Belknap/Harvard University,, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, wrinkled dust jacket. 438 pages, appendices, index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Collins, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A novel which takes a deeply irreverent look at literature, politics, patriotism and religion.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 305 pages. The Rebecca Notebook provides an unparalleled insight into the mastery of a writer''s craft and the inner vision that made du Maurier a household name. One of the great international bestsellers, Rebecca also inspired a film, a play and television dramas. This perfect companion volume, The Rebecca Notebook, outlines just how Rebecca came to be written, tracing its origins, developments and the directions it might have taken. The author reveals how she first came upon the secret house, hidden deep in the Cornish woodland, that was to become the romantic setting for her most famous novel: a house which stood derelict, and which she lovingly restored to create her own home. The accompanying Memories introduce other members of her family: her father Gerald, the famous actor; her grandfather George, whose Punch drawings made him world famous; and her cousins, for whom J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan. Small ownership sticker on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. University AL, University of Alabama Press, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, red cloth covers in a lightly worn dust jacket. Here are the passionate memoirs of the French Communard leader, a hero, saint and martyr to the socialists and anarchists battling the injustices of the Third Republic. 202 pages with a bibliography. Clean copy.

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. NY, Pantheon, 6th pr., 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 338 pages. Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth-that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn't exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm's absurdity when he had his own epiphany-that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system-that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality "out there" and reality as we experience it. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacker with minor edgewear, 352 pages. Bloom provides both an advanced guide to English and American Romanticism with its Victorian and Modern continuators, and an introduction to a new development in literary criticism that should increase the reader's grasp of the problematic but crucial relationship between the working poet and his poetic tradition. Mr. Bloom's judgment finds most significant cases of poetic influence to be examples of what he calls "a saving misprision, in which later poets overcome the anxieties induced by the glory of their precursors by creatively misinterpreting those great originals." Consequently, poets and poems are read against one another to locate the personal misinterpretations, the swerves that both separate and inescapably connect them. Among the poets studied are Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Emerson, Whitman, Yeats, Lawrence, Stevens, and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth with green lettering and decoration. No dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. A memoir of a year in rural Pennsylvania. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Birch Lane Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 269 pages. In The Rushdie Affair, Daniel Pipes explains why the publication of The Satanic Verses became a cataclysmic event with far-reaching political and social consequences. Pipes looks at the Rushdie affair in both its political and cultural aspects and shows in considerable detail what the fundamentalists perceived as so offensive in The Satanic Verses as against what Rushdie's novel actually said. Pipes explains how the book created a new crisis between Iran and the West at the time - disrupting international diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, and prospects for the release of Western hostages in Lebanon. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lanham MD, Lexington Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 143 pages. American nature writing characteristically embodies an appreciative, lyrical evocation of the natural world. But often, too, green-disposed authors have been moved to dramatize diverse, anthropogenic perils to environmental health. John Gatta freshly reveals how this dark yet graced and hopeful strain of environmental literature enlarges upon a jeremiad tradition of prophecy inherited from Puritan New England. Across successive historical periods, such expression has assumed a rich variety of American form--as creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, or film documentary. In the spirit of ancient Hebrew prophecy, jeremiads--unlike diatribes--reach beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward the prospect of change through a conversion of heart. Accordingly, the new climate fiction and much other writing steeped in what Gatta terms this "Green Jeremiad" tradition not only warn of material threats to life's flourishing, but may also look to stir spiritual understanding and renewal. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly edgeworn dust jacket. 239 pages including index. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins is widely regarded as "the father of the detective story." How curious that his own life has puzzled investigators despite numerous attempts to unravel it. Collins lived a publicly Victorian existence as a contemporary of Dickens, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake in mid-19th-century England. Yet upon his death he left a will dividing his estate equally -- between two mistresses.

Hardcover. NY, Mcdowell, Obolensky, 1st, 1957, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with faded gilt lettering to spine, 347 pages. Edited with an introduction by John C. Thirlwall. Clean copy.

Softcover. Rochester VT, Park Street Press, 1st thus, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages. This groundbreaking survey, originally published in London in 1860, is a radically open-minded look at the use of drugs across the world and throughout the ages. Early users of tobacco in Russia would have their noses cut off and repeat offenders their heads. Pope Innocent XII excommunicated any who used it in St. Peters. Marijuana users in 14th century Egypt would have their teeth extracted for the crime. Yet use of these and other forbidden substances continued to grow. If only as a record of the perennial failure of harsh punishments to deter drug use Victorian naturalist Mordecai Cooke's work The Seven Sisters of Sleep would remain significant. But Cooke's natural humor and keen insights have ensured this work's reputation as possibly the best early book from what has grown into an enormous body of literature on mind- and mood-altering substances. Written at a time, similar to our own, when drug use was being reconsidered, The Seven Sisters of Sleep is a thought-provoking and open-minded look at the use of drugs across the world and throughout the ages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Canada, Bond Street Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 378 pages. Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is a brilliant and highly readable biography of a literary figure of world-wide reputation. Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as "heart of darkness" and "The horror! The horror!" have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts. His popular legacy extends to Latin American fiction, to the spy novel, to the terrorist and anarchist character, and to film. The writers he has influenced range from T. S. Eliot to William Faulkner to V. S. Naipaul and John Le Carre. For a writer of "difficult" fiction he has enjoyed a remarkably wide impact, yet as Marlow proclaims in Lord Jim of the figure whose story he tells,"he was one of us," and so Conrad remains in fascinating ways.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 416 pages. In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan boards with pictorial cover in red and black. Sequence of events in Carroll's life and bibliography in back of book. B&w drawings by David Levine. Bright, clean copy, lacks dust jacket.

Hardcover. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. British cartoonist Tom Gauld (Mooncop, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Goliath) has created countless iconic strips for The Guardian over the course of his illustrious career. A master of condensing grand, highbrow themes into one- to eight-panel comics, his weekly strips embody his trademark British humor while simultaneously opening comics to an audience unfamiliar with the artistry that cartooning has to offer. Funny but serious, these postcards allow Gauld to put his impressive knowledge of history, literature, and pop culture on full display-his impeccable timing and distinctive visual style setting him apart from the rest.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Frog Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Amy Wallace's first meeting with Carlos Castaneda, the infamous anthropologist-turned-shaman, whose books described meetings with Yaqui Indian spiritual teacher Don Juan. Castaneda's rise was meteoric in the late 1960s as he wrote massive bestsellers, inspired many to experiment with psychedelics, and was dubbed "The Godfather of the New Age". The possibility that Castaneda's experiences may have been fabricated did little to compromise his legend. As the daughter of best-selling novelist Irving Wallace, Amy was rarely shy around famous people. When her father insisted she meet Castaneda, she at first demurred. Little did she know that a delightful first meeting would begin a 20-year friendship, followed by her descent into the dramatic and deeply troubled affair chronicled in this book. Wallace reveals the inner workings of the "Cult of Carlos", run by a charismatic authoritarian in his sixties who controlled his young female followers through emotional abuse, mind games, bizarre rituals, dubious teachings, and sexual excess. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 2nd Ed., 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. 664 pages with index. Volume 2 ONLY. Masaryk was the president of Czechoslovakia after World War I. Long a student of Russia this book was first published in 1913. Clean copy.

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, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light tanning to edges. 214 pages with a pictorial section in rear. Stated first printing on copyright page. The story of the building of birch-bark canoes and of a 150 mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology.