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, 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. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 208 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.
Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with light edgewear. 411 pages. Collects letters, novellas, essays, criticism, and a play by a leading intellectual of the Romantic period. Small owner's sticker on front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown & Co., 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardbound, 246 pages. Previous owner's inscription front end paper. Dust jacket with light edgewear and chipping. Protective mylar cover.
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. 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.
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. New York, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1st US, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering to spine. There are two small puncture holes in cloth spine, corresponding holes to dust jacket. Otherwise a very good copy with age-toning to edges and spine of dust jacket.
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.
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.
Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 242 pages. Light rubbing and scratching to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Seattle, Left Bank Books, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 263 pages, clean, unmarked. A comprehensive collection of the author's provocative writings which originally appeared in marginal and underground publications.
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. 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, Basic Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 337 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Essays by the New York City cultural critic; examines the work of artists, filmmakers and writers ranging from Anton Chekov to J. K. Rowling, including Stanley Kubrick, The Sopranos, Sex in the City, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Barbara Kingsolver. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Tanning to rear endpapers otherwise clean, very good in an unclipped dust jacket.
Hardcover. London, Hutchinson & Co, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 128 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Brick cloth covered boards with gilt titles to spine. Light foxing to endpapers. Frontis illustration, Eden Phillpotts, in black & white. Toning throughout, tight binding with clean pages throughout.
Hardcover. Peacham VT, The Perpetua Press, 1st, 2002, Hardcover in the publisher's cream-colored linen over boards with spine and upper board gilt-stamped black leather labels. No dust jacket, as issued. 88 pages, only 500 copies printed. A collection of interviews done with Shaw from 1924 - 1945. Bright and clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Baker and Taylor, 1st, 1910, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 348 pages. Contains some black & white illustrations and color frontispiece with tissue-guard. Green cloth covers with gold lettering and decoration. Color illustration pasted on front cover. Gilt top edge. Light rubbing to front cover, corners, spine. Both hinges starting to crack.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of his writings on his home country. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1st, 1869, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth binding with gilt lettering and design on front cover and spine. Plain brown endpapers, previous owner's inscription on first blank page/verso of frontis. The tissue on the frontispiece illustration has a tear. Front hinge partially cracked, binding shaken but holding. Cover and spine edges worn. This is the first combined printing. Hospital Sketches (by itself) was published in 1863 by James Redpath. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American writer, well-known for her "Little Women"and "Little Men" novels with sequels. Her "Hospital Sketches" were based on letters she sent home while serving as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army in Georgetown during the Civil War. This book also includes eight camp and fireside stories. Three b&w illustrations. Fair condition only.
Hardcover. New York, Viking Penguin, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 180 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. US, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 228 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket with light soil to rear cover.
Softcover. College Park, Sun & Moon Press, 1st Thus, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 396 pages. Softcover with light wear to cover edge. Remainder mark to fore-edge. Cover drawing by Djuna Barnes. Cover design by Katie Messborn. Black & white illustrations throughout. Clean, unmarked copy. Presents interviews with Vernon and Irene Castle, Lillian Russell, Diamond Jim Brady, Flo Ziegfeld, Billy Sunday, Alfred Stieglitz, James Joyce, and Coco Chanel
Hardcover. US, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 229 pages. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others.
Hardcover. Livingston, MT, Clack City Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 318 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with minor wear to edges.
Hardcover. Columbia MO, University of Missouri, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun's experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available. Hamsun's feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings--directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland.
Hardcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovers in dust jackets, two volume set reproducing the 1783 first edition. Edited and introduced by Harold F. Harding. "The Lectures went through at least 130 editions between 1783 and 1911. Because of its size and cost, the two-volume work invariably was abridged or issued as cheap one-volume reprints. No other edition available today combines the readability and beauty of the first Edinburgh edition, which is here faithfully and completely reproduced, so that scholars may have access to it again." (dust jacket copy). 496, 550 pages plus index. Clean set, some toning to dust jackets.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 512 pages, mild shelf wear. INSCRIBED BY BRODSKY on the front flyleaf with a little sketch of a sailboat. Dust jacket with light edgewear, closed teat on rear panel.
Hardcover. New York , Clarkson N. Potter, Inc, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 216 pages, b&w illustrations. Dust jacket with slightly faded spine and small tear to uper edge of front cover. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper. Clean, tight copy. "This collection of fifteen original essays, written especially for this occasion by distinguished Carrollian authorities from around the world, including Morton Cohen, Roger Henkle, Donald Rackin, Jean Gattegno, and Edward Guiliano, celebrates the many aspects of Carroll's life and art."
Hardcover. East Aurora, New York, The Roycrofters, 1st, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 164 pages, portraits of the author and subjects in the book with tissue guards. Embossed Half leather binding and decorated pages. Gilt top edge. Author's signature (in plate) on frontispiece portrait. Number 18 in The Little Journeys Series. A very handsome book.
Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 153 pages. SIGNED BY KOOSER on title page. Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1971, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 378 pages. From dust jacket notes: "For most Americans, the Second World War started on December 7, 1941, and much of the fighting took place in strange, faraway places. For the British, the war started on September 3, 1939, and much of the action took place in the skies over England. In the spring of 1940, after months of uneasy calm, Germany invaded the Lowlands and conquered France within a few days, leaving England without her only meaningful ally on the Continent. A year would pass before the Soviet Union was drawn into the war, and eighteen months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United Kingdom, with a land area about the size of Wyoming, was alone, all alone, with only the Straits of Dover separating the island from Hitler's war machine. For six years Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war for The New Yorker magazine from her native England. Even at the height of the air war over London, when 'all that is best in the good life of civilized effort appears to be slowly and painfully keeling over,' she continued to file her fortnightly reports in an understated but dramatic fashion that reflected the fortitude of her fellow countrymen: 'The announcements of the first air-raid deaths are beginning to appear in the obituary columns of the morning papers. No mention is made of the cause of death, but the conventional phrase "very suddenly" is always used.' William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, has assembled Miss Panter-Downes' 'Letter from London' columns into a consecutive, on-the-spot chronicle of the war in England."
Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.
Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1st US, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 300 pages, maroon cloth covers with a chipped, edgeworn dust jacket. A collection of scholarly essays with subjects from Herodotus to Kipling, from Greek and Roman literature to Shakespeare.
Hardcover. London , B. Blake, 1st Thus, 1837, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 848 pages. Hardcover. Marbled edges and endpapers. Raised bands on spine. Clipping of a silhouette of Edward Gibbon pasted on to front end paper. Previous owners notes in pencil on front endpapers. Wear to covers, especially corners. Rubbing. Chipping at spine. Clean, unmarked text.
Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 274 pages. Faint foxing to upper edge of brodart protected dust jacket and to top edge, else a very nice, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Doubleday , 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 118 pages, b&w photographs by John Ranard. A very clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers, 1st US, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt stamping. 249 pages plus publisher's ads Candid opinions, in a series of essays on literature, music, fashion and character by the author of "John Halifax Gentleman". 'If I say somewhat hard things, I beg my readers to believe me that it is not out of a hard heart, careless of giving pain, but a sad heart, knowing pain must be given.' (Preliminary.) Uncommon. Mild spotting to covers otherwise clean, very good.
 "Elements of Refusalby: Zerzan, John")
 "Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imaginationby: Siegel, Lee")
