Literature Essays

Hardcover. Keene NY, Ausable Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 264 pages. Miniature critical essays on contemporary poets and fiction writers. Originally written as introductions to public readings, these essays are unabashedly celebratory, a welcome relief from the usual critical fare. As a critic, Boyers has been praised by such literary giants as Harold Bloom and John Bayley. Authors covered: Joseph Brodsky, Carl Dennis, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, Robert Pinsky, Saul Bellow, Nicholas Delbanco, Bernard Malamud, Jay McInerney, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, and many others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Donald Hall lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a "treasure" of a book in which he "balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude" (Washington Post). Before his passing in 2018, nearing ninety, Hall delivered this new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. He intersperses memories of exuberant days--as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably inclined to say, "I couldn't care less"--with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of extreme old age. "Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?" Hall answers his own question by revealing several vivid instances of "the worst thing I ever did," and through equally uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as original and searing as anything he's written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 2nd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 221 pages plus index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Cudahy, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Small chip to bottom of spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as 'the poet laureate of appetite' (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch collects many of his food pieces for the first time - and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1s, 1901, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Light green cloth, lettered and bordered in gilt, top text block edge in gilt. Illustrated with black and white photographic plates by Clifton Johnson. Light shelf wear, bookplate on inside front cover with black marking. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, S. Highley, Fleet-Street, 1st, 1792, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, half-leather over marbled boards, 556 pages. A collection of essays, letters, dedications, poems and other pieces purported to be the work of Johnson in the editor's Preface. The anonymous compiler makes the case that the pieces should have been included in the Dr. Johnson's Works lately published. Their authenticity may be questionable in some cases. A penciled note inside the front cover suggests this is Vol. 14 of his works with a new title page and "without Stockdale adds(?)..." Curious edition not found elsewhere. Front cover and first page detached, a solid binding, two bookplates, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with faded gilt title on spine, 426 pages. A collection of profiles on great thinkers and writers through the ages. B&w frontis of Walt Whitman, 9 other b&w portraits. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor wear. 532 pages. An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics.

Hardcover. Reading, Mass., Addison Wesley, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 284 pages. Dust jacket unclipped, with minor edge wear and laminate peeling. Otherwise, clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 269 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 594 pages. A landmark in postwar American literary criticism, forty-one extended essays on contemporary poets, including Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, and James Merrill. Blending biography, textual analysis, and philosophical reflection, it defined a generation's poetic discourse. The book stands as both a map of mid-century American verse and a statement of Howard's erudite critical voice. Light shelfwear, fraying to top, bottom of dust jacket spine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1873, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth cover with gold lettering, black borders and beveled edges. 444 pages, "Originally published in the Washington Sunday Chronicle and Philadelphia Press". Essays and profiles of prominent men in the 1800s. Hinges cracked at front and rear covers but overall tight and clean.

Softcover. NY, Spuyten Duyvil, 1st, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 187 pages, Essays on contemporary American literature. Small bump to edge causing a slight wave to top edge, Clean copy.

Softcover. St. Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st wraps, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, SIGNED BY NOVAKOVICH on title-page.

Hardcover. UK, Aquarian Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Black & white illustrations, 256 pages. "Arthur Machen (1863-1947) .was acclaimed in his day as one of the finest stylists in English prose.The sequences of letters to his friends A.E.Waite, Colin Summerford, and John Galsworth, and to fellow authors and publishers, illuminate Machen's courageous struggles against poverty and adversity, while reflecting his lifelong preoccupations with literature, the occult, the Christian faith, and Celtic myth."

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1965, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. A collection of Updike's nonfiction prose written the previous decade, with topics including Ted Williams, J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark, Max Beerbohm, among others. Yellow cloth covers with spotting, concealed by the dj. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with spine label, 319 pages. First printing with 1931 on title page and Scribner's "A" on copyright page. Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism - a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer." Light tanning to spine label, clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon And Schuster, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 253 pages. Thirty-two essays by the New Yorker magazine humorist. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University Park, Pa., Penn State University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Baudelaire's illustrations throughout. Minor dust jacket edge wear, otherwise, very clean, bright and tight copy.

Softcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 414 pages. A work of literary criticism in which Said differentiates between the concept of "origin" and "beginning", also reflecting reflexively on the role of criticism and of the intellectual within a larger culture. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Saint Paul, Minn., Graywolf Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Spotless and tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 244 pages. Notable collection of writings about children's books by such contributors as Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Paula Fox, Arnold Lobel, etc. Clean copy.

Softcover. San Jose CA, Permanent Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, glossy green paper wrappers, 272 pages plus ads in rear. Wilson and Michael Shea published a quarterly journal in the late eighties called TRAJECTORIES. It was a "newsletter of mind-blowing iconoclasm." This is a collection of the best articles from the first few issues. Contributors include Arlen Wilson, Scott Apel, Timothy Leary, Linus Pauling, George Carlin and Ed McMahon. Clean, bright copy.