Literature Essays

Hardcover. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly rubbed dust jacket, 290 pages. These brief essays appeared in a regular column that Rexroth did for The Saturday Review of Literature. The subjects include many of the standard classic texts from world literature, i.e., Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gibbon, Whitman, Tolstoy, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lincoln MA, Penmaen Press, 1st Ltd Ed., 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 103 pages. Introduction by Walter Harding. Actor/author Christopher Childs compiled these excerpts and performed them as a stage monologue in order to convey the essence and personality of Henry David Thoreau. The first performance took place on July 6, 1975, in Concord, Mass. This book appeared three years later. Here the selections are organized into fourteen chapters that address a variety of topics, such as Gods, On Being a Writer, Friendship and Singularity, and John Brown. Source footnotes appear in an appendix. The book begins with an introduction by Thoreau Society secretary Walter Harding. Selected wood engravings by Michael McCurdy supplement the text. A publication note on the final page indicates that only 2,000 copies of this book were printed. Short tear to dj repaired on the reverse side. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st US, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket, 492 pages. Includes his renowned essays on Churchill, Hobsbawn, Max Eastman, De Gaulle, and Simone Weil. No markings.

Hardcover. New York City, Blue Faun Publications, 1st, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 203 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated pastedown on front cover designed by Mahlon Blaine. Illustrated endpapers by Heinrich Vogeler. "The entire edition of Colours is limited to 1950 copies; 1900 copies numbered and registered, for sale; and 50 copies, lettered A to XX, for review only. Type has been distributed, and Colours will not be reprinted. This copy is No. 386". Some foxing to front cover pastedown, and narrow chip missing from spine label. Spine slightly cocked. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1st Edition, 1920, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 370 pages. Hardcover. Green cloth covers with gilt titles to cover & spine. Fraying, scuffing to edges. Light sunfade to spine. As is, with light pencil marking throughout. Cracked rear hinge.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket with short closed tears. 14 original and thoughtful interviews - Burroughs discusses Paris in the 50s, the Olympia Press and the issue of obscenity, Norman Mailer on the Jack Abbott issue, Paul Theroux on Americans abroad, Scott Spencer on the experience of having a movie made from his book 'Endless Love' and more. Biographical information and photographs of each author. 324 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University of Mississippi, 1st, 1987, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages. Gathers interviews with the Tennessee short story writer in which he discusses his career, writing, character development themes, settings, and growing older. Clean copy.

Softcover. University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 320 pages. Here is a collection of interviews that cover the period from 1967 through 1993. Many are translations of interviews that originally appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or Swedish periodicals. Several are published here for the first time in any language. Giving attention to Sontag's education and the development of her aesthetic and moral temperament, they cover Sontag's rich career as a distinguished writer, filmmaker, dramatist, and cultural critic. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Bros., 1st US, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Black & white photos by Bryan & Norman Westwood. Previous owner's signature on front end paper.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1st, 1920, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 302 pages. Previous owner's signature on front endpaper. Light pencil marginalia to last page. Browning to front endpapers. Red cloth binding with black lettering.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages. Cultures of United States Imperialism represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the United States. Light shelf wear.

Hardcover. Edinburgh, John Grant, Revised/Reprint, 1896, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 301 pages. Cloth boards. Previous owners bookplate on front inside cover. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 312 pages. The highlight of Desolation Peak is the journal Kerouac kept, starkly revealing the depth of his poverty, the extremity of his mood swings, and the ongoing arguments with himself over the future direction of his life, his writing, and faith. Along with the journal, he worked on a series of projects, including "Ozone Park," another installment of the Duluoz Legend beginning in 1943, after his discharge from the Navy; "The Martin Family," an intended sequel to The Town and the City, and "Desolation Adventure," a series of sketches that became part 1 of Desolation Angels. In writing it, Kerouac was re-committing himself to his more experimental, then-unpublishable style, declaring in the journal that "the form of the future is no-form." Also included in Collected Writings is "The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing," Kerouac's "transliteration" of the Diamond Sutra, his "Desolation Blues" and "Desolation Pops" poems, and assorted prose sketches and dreams. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 1969, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, lightly wrinkled dust jacket that's unclipped. This is Snyder's first essay/excerpt collection, "Earth House Hold" being a play on the roots of the word "ecology. 143 pages. Dust jacket with foxing, tanning. No markings.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 395 pages. The essays gathered here, in addition to those by editors Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloob, are written by leading scholars of Asian cultures--among them Donald Keene, Peter Awn, Barbara Stoler Miller, Ainslie Embree, Burton Watson, C.T. Hsia, Paul Anderer, and others. They introduce classics from the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, providing entree to texts which have emerged as monuments of Asian thought and literature. Among the works discussed are the Qu'ran, the philosophy of history of Ibn Khaldun, the Upanishads, the epic Mahabarata, the philosopher Mencius, the Lotus Sutra, T'and Poetry, the Tale of Genji, and the poet Basho.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth stamped in gilt, 3 colors. Beautiful gilt and sihouette vignette of the London skyline. 80 black and white drawings by Joseph Pennell. Top edge gilt. A collection of periodical pieces written over a span of thirty years by James, all about his travels in England. Name and date on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1938, 522 pages. Hardcover. Green tweed cloth covers with black & gilt printed design to cover & spine. Dust jacket with moderate toning, now protected with a plastic cover. Light toning & several illustrations in bw throughout. A clean copy.

Hardcover. Little Rock AK, Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 358 pages. For those who care about literature or simply love a good laugh (or both), Charles Portis has long been one of America's most admired novelists. His 1968 novel True Grit is fixed in the contemporary canon, and four more have been hailed as comic masterpieces. Now, for the first time, his other writings--journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir, and even a play--have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, his first new book in more than twenty years. All the familiar Portis elements are here: picaresque adventures, deadpan humor, an expert eye for detail and keen ear for the spoken word, and encounters with oddball characters both real and imagined. The collection encompasses the breadth of his fifty-year writing career, from his gripping reportage of the civil rights movement for the New York Herald Tribune to a comic short story about the demise of journalism in the 21st century. New to even the most ardent fan is his three-act play, Delray's New Moon, performed onstage in 1996 and published here for the first time.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 134 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY HALL ON BOOKPLATE ON FRONT END PAPER. Gutter crack on page 132, otherwise tight copy. Newspaper clipping laid in.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton & Company, 1st, 1852, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with black title to front board and to spine. 261 pages, publisher's ads. Contains of an early review of Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as accounts of travels to the Nubian Desert and Arctic, a history of Spanish literature, and literary essays and reviews of works by Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, and Hawthorne. Mild foxing, some light chipping and wear to spine.

Hardcover. Knoxville TN, University of Tennessee Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 235 pages. Evelyn Scott was a significant literary figure in American letters of the 1920s and 1930s, an important contributor in the experimental forms and techniques of the modernist movement. She wrote and published in many genres -- the novel, short fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism, and drama. Since that time, Scott's work has been forgotten by most readers and critics, and her reputation as an important writer of her day has been obscured. This collection, which features an introduction and thirteen critical essays, is the first volume to focus on Scott's work rather than her intriguing yet troubled life and initiates a long-needed examination of Scott's innovations in fiction, memoir, and other genres. The various essays take diverse critical approaches to Scott's canon, including her best-known works -- Escapade and The Wave -- and explore her views on topics such as women, politics, religion, art, and the South. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan--all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1st, 1863, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 319 pages. Portrait of Thoreau on frontispiece with tissue guard. First edition, one of 1,558 copies printed. Original publisher's blue-green pebbled cloth with blind-stamped borders and center wreath. Spine lettered in gilt. Brown-coated end papers. Ten essays including a 33 page biographical sketch by Emerson of Thoreau and nine essays by Thoreau, among them the famous "Walking."

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket with mild tanning, 254 pages. Bound in bright blue cloth in white dust jacket printed in red and black. First Printing stated. A collection of Isherwood's writings from nearly four decades. Clean copy.