Fiction Novels

Hardcover. NY, Ballantine Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1872, Cottonwood, Kansas, is a one-horse speck on the map; a community of run-down farms, dusty roads, and two-bit crooks. Self-educated saloon owner and photographer Bill Ogden looks on his adopted town with an eye to making a profit or getting out. His brains and ambition bring him to the attention of one Marc Leval, a wealthy Chicago developer with big plans for the small town. The advent of the railroad and rumors of a cattle trail turn Cottonwood into a wild and wooly boomtown--and with Leval as a partner, Ogden dreams of bringing civilization to the prairie. But civilizing the Great Plains was never that simple. While many in Cottonwood distrust Leval's motives, and mob violence threatens to derail the town's dreams of greatness, Ogden finds himself dangerously obsessed with Leval's stunningly beautiful wife. Meanwhile, plying its sinister trade unnoticed, an apparently ordinary local farm family quietly butchers traveling salesmen, weary travelers, and other unsuspecting wanderers.In his own inimitable brand of narrative wizardry, Scott Phillips traces the metamorphosis of a frontier town that becomes a lightning rod for sin, corruption, and murder. He also brings to life actual crimes that befell Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s, carried out by a strange clan who popularly became known as The Bloody Benders. Brilliantly written, maliciously fun, and full of many surprises, Cottonwood is historical fiction at its finest.

Hardcover. London, The Folio Society, 1st illust thus, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorative boards with black slipcase. 445 pages, color frontispiece and 12 color plates by David Hughes. First published in 1938, recounting the life of the Byzantine general Belisarius (AD 500-565), It was not a peaceful time for the Roman empire. Invaders threatened all fronts, but they grew to respect and fear the name of Belisarius, Emperor Justinian's greatest general. With this book Robert Graves again demonstrates his command of a vast historical subject, creating a startling and vivid picture of a decadent era. Forward by Lindsey Davis. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Chris Offutt is an outstanding literary talent, whose work has been called "lean and brilliant" (New York Times Book Review) and compared by reviewers to Tobias Wolff, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver. He's been awarded the Whiting Writers Award for Fiction/Nonfiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, among numerous other honors. His first work of fiction in nearly two decades, Country Dark is a taut, compelling novel set in rural Kentucky from the Korean War to 1970. Tucker, a young veteran, returns from war to work for a bootlegger. He falls in love and starts a family, and while the Tuckers don't have much, they have the love of their home and each other. But when his family is threatened, Tucker is pushed into violence, which changes everything. The story of people living off the land and by their wits in a backwoods Kentucky world of shine-runners and laborers whose social codes are every bit as nuanced as the British aristocracy, Country Dark is a novel that blends the best of Larry Brown and James M. Cain, with a noose tightening evermore around a man who just wants to protect those he loves.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st, 1887, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 260 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Brief notes in pencil on front endpaper. Clean, tight copy. Habberton spent nearly twenty years as the literary and drama critic for the New York Herald, but he is best known for his stories about early California life and for his hugely successful book 'Helen's Babies.'

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 295 pages. West's unfinished novel, the subsequent chapters following This Real Night. A feminist novel that reveals both the problems of marriage and the ecstasies of sexual love, completing the final chapters of the saga that began with THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS, and continued with THIS REAL NIGHT. Afterword by Victoria Glendinning. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Berkley Prime Crime, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Very good in a bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York , Harcourt, Brace and Company , 1st, 1924, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 238 pages. Orange cloth. Minor soiling to covers, previous owner's signature on front end paper, else a neat, tight copy. Author's second novel. Bodenheim was a very influential realist writer, considered the quintessential American Bohemian.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by "cold bump"--making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. *NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE ATLANTIC, VULTURE, VOGUE, THE WASHINGTON POST, KIRKUS REVIEWS, NPR, THE ECONOMIST, THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOX, and more*. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Indianapolis , Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth with gilt lettering. B&W plates by Frederic Dorr Steele. Hinges partially cracked, otherwise nice, clean.

Hardcover. NY, Library of America , 4th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 990 pages. James M. Cain's pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality. Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation. In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny. The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive. William Lindsay Gresham's controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction. I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1st, 1948, 240 pages. Paperback. Dell Mystery Book #207. Light creasing to paper wrappers. Hinge glue undone in front. Map on rear wrapper.

Hardcover. NY, Walker Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In Sallis's beautifully written second book to feature Turner, an ex-cop and ex-con (after 2004's Cypress Grove), Turner is working as a deputy sheriff in Cripple Creek, Tenn., a small town where crime is minor and strictly local. Then, late one night, Sheriff Don Lee arrests drunk driver Judd Kurtz with $200,000 in a nylon gym bag hidden in the trunk of his car. Kurtz breaks out of the town jail, seriously wounding two officers in the process. Turner's investigation leads him to an organized crime connection in nearby Memphis that enmeshes him in a web of escalating violence.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press , 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright. unclipped dust jacket. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Morrow, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Werner Ernst, a second-year medical resident, encounters the stark realities of the modern intensive care unit, the fears and illusions of the loved ones of the terminally ill, and the exhaustion and irony of doctors, nurses, and technicians. A first novel.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1912, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 312 pages. Hardcover. Rare first edition. Covers bound in green with gilt title on spine and front cover. Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Covers show some age wear: moisture stain on back cover, some soil and fraying/chipping on spine. Pages and edges have age-yellowing. Foxing on endpapers and preliminary/back pages, but doesn't affect text. Split at gutters in a few places, but binding still tight. In good condition for its age.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Boswell's debut novel of an eccentric Arizona family was called "brilliant" "piercing" and "dazzling" by the critics, and adapted into a film with Peter Berg and Peter Coyote. Signed by author Boswell in ink on the title page.

Hardcover. New York, Knopf, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover.339 pages. Slight sunning to dust jacket spine, else a very nice, tight copy. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page.

Softcover. New York, Dell Publishing, 1st, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages. Paperback. Dell Book #104. Minor wear to paper wrappers. Creasing to covers and spine. Frot wrapper is separated from spine. Pencil notation to first page.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Provides fresh insight into the age old tale of a woman who grows as an individual and literally explodes out of her marriage. May Sarton describes the burgeoning artist confined by a social contract. Light fading to spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macaulay, 1st, 1924, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bright blue covers with titles and image of talon in black. Black & white frontispiece by George W. Gage. Light wear to covers otherwise VG.

Hardcover. New York, Sun Dial Press, Inc., Reprint, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 269 pages. Hardcover. Reprint. Price clipped dust jacket with darkening to spine, chipping along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Covici-Friede, 2nd pr., 1936, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 269 pages. Previous owners name and the number "10" on front endpaper. Top edge stained black. Price clipped dust jacket with light chipping along edges. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1st UK, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 272 pages. Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Roslyn NY, Walter J. Black, Book Club Ed., 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. Three mystery novels in one volume. Detective Book Club Series. Clean, bright copy. No markings.