Hardcover. NY, Sheed and Ward, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with faded spine, 480 pages. Richard Kostelanetz's monumental evisceration of the American book world circa 1974--the self-appointed backslapping elites, the perpetual disdain for the unconventional, the laziness in book reviewing and fear of losing one's status when criticising the wrong thing--remains, as a final sadness, itself a rare out of print tome. Kostelanetz has written perhaps the most fearless exploration of literary politics in print, taking on and naming the titans at the top of the heap, dissecting the power structures that emerged in the 1950s and 60s, and the emergence of the plutocratic hierarchies that continue to dominate publishing. Outing the various cliques as mobs, and using apt and amusing mafia parallels, Kostelanetz is unrelenting in his meticulousness, and counteracts the status quo with a passionate defence of the avant-garde, using the second half of the book to bring light to the various emerging authors of experimental poetry, fiction, and mixed media works around the time. At times a touch long-winded and overfed with quotes, this nevertheless is an essential read for those requiring a hard slap as to the inherent evil of the corporate book world and why indie is the only way forward. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Riverhead Books, 1st US, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The secrets people kept, the lies they told. In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another, and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatory men. Ireland's folklore and politics loom large, and poverty, emotional and material, seeps through every crack. By an award-winning Irish writer, her second book. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Allison & Busby Limited, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY MARSTON on the title page. In Victoria's England, a rowdy crowd boards the Great Western Excursion train on their way to an illegal bare-knuckles fight in Maidenhead north of London . A brutal murder on the train brings Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck to stop the train murders, by a murderer who uses a noose as a death weapon--is this a 'public execution, a retribution killing? Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 256 pages. In this unique blend of historical fiction and cutting-edge suspense, author Diane Wei Liang succeeds in delivering an incredible mystery veiled behind the red curtain of contemporary Chinese life and culture. Set in Beijing "The Eye of Jade" introduces readers to the enigmatic Mei Wang, the country's first successful female private investigator, and her struggle to uncover the location of a rare and treasured artifact that is believed to have been absconded from the Luoyang Museum during the Cultural Revolution. For Wang this is a task of special importance, and can only stand to make her later life and reputation glimmer, but as she soon finds in the back alleys, this is not going to be easy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED by the author on the title page, without dedication. Signed with upper case signature JASPER to the title page. Complete with 2 limited edition postcards (Dodo Manual/Speed Camera Photo), upgrade and instruction leaflet for upgrade. Very light age toning to the text block although this is an as-new, unread copy. The first of the "Thursday Next" novels. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st US, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED by the author on the title page, without dedication. Jasper Fforde's novel introduces literary detective Thursday Next and her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England. In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. London, Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1st transl. thus, 1853, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, marbled boards with black leather spine and corners. 100 pages, illustrated frontis, drawing on title page. Preface on Fable, The Fabulists and La Fontaine by the translator, text is formatted in double columns per page. Name on inside front cover, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY/London, Overlook Duckworth, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Sven Norberg searches for his mezzo-soprano wife in the midwestern town of Trude. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 136 pages. Minna wishes for many things. She wishes she understood the quote taped above her mother's typewriter:Fact and fiction are different truths. She wishes her mother would stop writing long enough to really listen to her. She wishes her house were peaceful and orderly like her friend Lucas's. Most of all, she wishes she could find a vibrato on her cello and play Mozart the way he deserves to be played. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Somerville MA, Candlewick Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 184 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the front fly leaf, in addition the there is a handwritten greeting card from Losure. The author presents this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family archives. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control. Back matter includes source notes, a bibliography, and an index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt and Co., 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Rikki Ducornet's boldest imaginative act yet-a brilliant novel about the Marquis de Sade that will forever change the way we regard one of history's most notorious men. Picture a dramatic courtroom scene: during the French Revolution a fan-maker is on trial because of a manuscript seized in her rooms and her friendship with the Marquis de Sade, the notorious author of Justine, who has already been condemned and imprisoned by the same court for his sexual transgressions. Not only has she made exquisite and sexually provocative fans for her friend, but she has also coauthored with the Marquis a book about the infamous Spanish missionary, Bishop Landa, accusing him of massacres and other hideous abuses against the native population of the New World. The men of the court are so consumed with punishing the authors of this scandalous book that they are blinded to the folly of their own accusations against the Marquis. 212 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. Flame Tree Publishing, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 128 pages. From classic Star Wars, Blade Runner and Matrix all the way back to The Day the Earth Stood Still sf movie posters have lurked and flickered across our subways, streets and bedroom walls since the early 1950s. From the kitsch of the Attack of the 50ft Woman, through to the many versions of Time Machine or War of the Worlds the 1980s hailed a more sophisticated filmic appeal for our sf dollar, with the onset of green screen and cgi. The films may change, but somehow the posters remain the same: geeky, powerful, escapist fantasy, and we love them all! The book features an arguable, quirky selection of what we think are the best.

Hardcover. NY, Soho Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Senora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Senora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other." But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Danticat writes one of the most lovely portrayals of the dynamics between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share an island and have engaged in conflict since before the independence of Haiti. The author is able to paint a picture that does not seem to me to take sides, but simply states the reality of what happened through the fictional lives of the characters. I am interested in the way that the relationships between the Haitians and Dominicans are not always strained, and sometimes are extremely close, but those relationships are challenged in the middle of the political strains.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Author's second novel, featuring Marina Robinson, a 'failure analyst' engineer, who heads to India to investigate the 10-year past death of her sister.

Hardcover. NY, The Free Press, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 330 pages. This book traces the central developments in American literature between and 1919. It opens with an account of the consolidation of realism as the dominant standard of critical value and brings the reader forward to the moment, at the end of World War I, when American writers began to take a recognized place among the masters of literary modernism. The ascendancy of the novel as the principal genre of the realists is presented against a broader cultural and historical background. Professor Berthoff reviews and evaluates American fiction from the time when Howells, Twain, and Henry James were still under attack by old-school idealizers, to the emergence of a new critical and testamentary realism with Crane, Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, reprint, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 597 pages, no dust jacket. Title page dated 1939, An early reprint without the 'A'. Bound in red cloth with black signature on top board and gold titles against black labels of spine. Light wear to top of cloth spine, mild darkening to spine. Clean copy.

Boston, Little Brown , 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in black. B&w drawings by Erik Blegvad. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf other wise very good, clean. A banker rents a house to Peter Finch, charging him next to nothing because there's a small volcano in the basement. Eventually, there is a volcanic eruption, but of course, not in the basement. The house is spared, the family is safe, the town officials get re-elected, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Hardcover. NY, Seabury Press, 1st US, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrated in colo and b&w by Joanna Troughton. An East Saxon boy, recently converted to Christianity, tries to deal with the villager's and his own brother's hostility to the monks with whom he now makes his home. Dust jacket with minor edgewear.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In post-hurricane Charleston, Rob begins to salvage his life, but the tempestuous forces of love draw him into the shaken lives of family, friends, and lovers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Franklin Watts, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 83 pages. Black & white illustrations by Douglas Gorsline. Dust jacket has light edgewear. Dust jacket is protected by a mylar cover.

Softcover. London, Hard Case Crime, 1st thus, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, colorful wraps with a retro-style illustration by Ken Laager. Crime fiction readers know Quarry, the ruthless killer-for-hire, from Max Allan Collins' acclaimed novels--most recently THE LAST QUARRY, which told the story of the assassin's final assignment (and was the basis for the feature film The Last Lullaby). But where did Quarry's story start? For the first time ever, the best-selling author of ROAD TO PERDITION takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry's first job: infiltrating a college town and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful, young students is the least of his sins. Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Printed for I. Riley and Co, 2nd Ed., 1806, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, The First Settlers of Virginia, an Historical Novel, Exhibiting a View of the Rise and Progress of the Colony at James Town, a Picture of Indian Manners, the Countenance of the Country, and its Natural Productions. Hardcover, Second edition, considerably enlarged. Contemporary calf over boards. Octavo. xii, [13]-284 pages. PLEASE NOTE: No frontispiece engraving of Pocahontas rescuing John Smith. No signs of extraction, so probably never bound in. A reproduction of the frontis laid in. This is one of the earliest American romantic novels about Native Americans. Davis was an English immigrant with literary aspirations who lived in Philadelphia at the beginning of the 19th century. He was acquainted with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. He originally adapted this material from his 1803 "Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America" and published it in 1805 as "Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas: An Indian Tale." This expanded version includes Davis's autobiography, "A Memoir of the Author" (pp. {275]-284). Includes "Errata" on page [274]. Clean, no markings.

Hardcover. New York, 1st US, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 255 pages. Some wear and scratches to dust jacket, else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Marcus creates a chilling world where the speech of children is killing their parents. After being forced to leave their daughter Esther to fend for herself, Sam and Claire end up at a government lab intent on creating non-lethal speech. But when Sam discovers the truth about what's going on there, he realizes reuniting with his daughter is the only way to keep his sanity. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Junior Literary Guild, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with mild discoloration, 278 pages, previous owner's signature on page opposite half-title. Color frontis painting and black & white illustrations by Herbert Rogers.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY FFORDE on the title page, signed "Jasper". Postcard for Sommeworld laid in. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED by the author on the title page, without dedication. The second book in this series featuring Jack Spratt, investigator, family man, and head of the nursery crime division. Promotional post card laid-in. Clean, like new.

New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, hardcover, 108 pages. Black & white illustrations by William Geldart. In a nice dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st US, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with a faded spine. 75 pages with monotone illustrations throughout from the engravings of Thomas Bewick .".an allegorical tale based on the old tradition that on Christmas night the animals in the stable -- the ass, the cow, the sheep and the dove --have the power of human speech and thus are able to tell one another of the gifts they have given to the Child." By the author of the Mary Poppins books. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, The Folio Society, 1st illust. thus, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorated blue cloth in a slipcase. 254 pages, 10 b&w illustrations by Paul Hogarth. Introduction by Antonia Fraser. First published in 1948. This is the story of an investigation of a kidnapping of a young woman and the abuse by a mother and daughter who live in a house called The Franchise. The young woman gives a detailed description of the attic room where she was supposedly kept and abused, but, Inspector Alan Grant of the Scotland Yard is not so sure.

Hardcover. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st, 1934, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers wth gilt stamping. A University Professor is drawn into a plot to kill the Prime Minister. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn and chipped dust jacket. A volume in the Mainstream of Americas Series, edited by Lewis Gannett. Between the period of settlements in colonial America and the time of the Revolutionary War, English and French interests clashed in a struggle to determine who would rule the New World. It was a time from which a great deal of fiction draws inspiration, an exciting and dramatic period well~salted with the Washingtons, Johnsons, Frontenacs, Amhersts, Wolfes, and Montcalms who so greatly influenced the early growth of our land. Edward Hamilton has reconstructed this absorbing story of wilderness, forts, and weapons with a scholarly respect for minute detail. Name on half-title page, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Crowell, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. First edition of the author's 3rd novel and second B. F. Cage story. A story of murder set in Paris.

Hardcover. London, J.M. Dent and Sons, reprint, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 246 pages, 4 color plates, b&w drawings by H. Baumhauer.

Hardcover. NY, World, 1st US, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket. A man moves to a village after being acquitted of murdering his wife and child. When girls from the neighboring school are killed or go missing, the town is ready to explode and Superintendent Folly arrives to sort things out. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st US, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Translated from Swedish by Alan Blair.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Corrie refuses to believe that her father is dying until she realizes that no matter what happens, a part of him will always live in her. Clean copy. Light fade to spine.

Softcover. Rutland VT, self-published, 2nd Ed., 1909, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, red paper covers stamped with a black title and cartoon portrait of author. Yankee humor in the form of short sketches originally published in the Rutland Herald. The author (pictured in a photo on the first inside page) was a member of the Vermont legislature. Several cartoons by George Randall embellish the 90 pages of text. Ads in rear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Bantam, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The author's fifth novel featuring gambler & magician Lou (Shifty) Anderson. Down on his luck, Shifty goes to work as a chauffeur for an elderly millionaire. Enter his employer's long-lost showgirl daughter.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 223 pages. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake's reputation has only grown, with fans continuing to marvel at his tightly constructed plots, no-nonsense prose, and keen, even unsettling, insights into human behavior. With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse of another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn't busy making stuff up. And it's fascinating. Setting previously published pieces, many little seen, alongside never-before-published material found in Westlake's working files, the book offers a clear picture of the man behind the books-including his thoughts on his own work and that of his peers, mentors, and influences. The book opens with revealing (and funny) fragments from an unpublished autobiography, then goes on to offer an extended history of private eye fiction, a conversation among Westlake's numerous pen names, letters to friends and colleagues, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, and much, much more. There's even a recipe for Sloth a la Dortmunder. Really. Rounded out with a foreword by Westlake's longtime friend Lawrence Block, The Getaway Car is a fitting capstone to a storied career and a wonderful opportunity to revel anew in the voice and sensibility of a master craftsman.

Hardcover. Boston, David Godine, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrations by Barry Moser. A narrative poem about The Canadian Mounties being overwhelmed in a snow storm. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Holiday House, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with cover art and interior map by Trina Schart Hyman. 12 year old Gabe is invited by his grandfather to help shear the sheep on Ghost Island where Gabe sees the ghost who haunts the island. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Small, Maynard & Co., reprint, 1911, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in green cloth with gilt title box, 312 pages. Early printing of this mystery set in the world of international opera. Light shelf wear, otherwise clean.

NY, Viking, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. B&w illustrations by Fritz Wegner. A breezy and entertaining tale set in the days when school desks had inkwells features a renowned, but slightly nutty, doctor, a kidnapping, some notorious criminals, a lonely girl, and an extremely humongous baby.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 69 pages. Black & white illustrations by Alan E. Cober. A young adult fantasy about a frozen land, written in second person.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow & Company, 1st, 1942, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with orange stamping on spine, 284 pages. Clean, tight copy. A captivating mystery novel featuring the brilliant detective Sir Henry Merrivale. Set in a remote English village, the story revolves around the mysterious death of a man found burned to death in a locked room, with gold paint covering his body. Merrivale is called to unravel the perplexing puzzle, delving into the lives of the villagers and their secrets.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow & Company, 1st, 1942, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with orange stamping on spine, 284 pages. Faint lean to spine, mild shelf wear. Clean, tight copy. A captivating mystery novel featuring the brilliant detective Sir Henry Merrivale. Set in a remote English village, the story revolves around the mysterious death of a man found burned to death in a locked room, with gold paint covering his body. Merrivale is called to unravel the perplexing puzzle, delving into the lives of the villagers and their secrets.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd Mead, BC Ed., 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 89 pages. Weekly Reader Book Club Edition. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2nd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glossy pictorial boards with tan cloth spine. 24 pages illustrated in color by Scott Cook. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 214 pages. INSCRIBED BY MAZER on a blank prelim page.