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, 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. London, Hogarth Press, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine. Twenty-seven essays on the art of fiction and the art of biography. No dust jacket, 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. London, Hutchinson, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lughtly worn dust jacket. 589 pages. Light shelf wear, chipping and closed tear to dust jacket. Review slip laid in.
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. 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.
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. London, Macmillan Company, 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 541 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Light fraying on edges of cover boards. Previous owner's name on front end paper. Gilt lettering on spine, light brown covers.
Softcover. San Rafael CA, Coracle Press, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 330 pages, b&w frontis. A new printing of the journal and letters of Stephen Mackenna (1872-1934), a vivid and representative thinker whose life intersected with many of the leading figures of his day, and especially those of the Irish literary renaissance. The editor, E. R. Dodds, writes: Stephen MacKenna's working life was divided among three countries, and was further broken by two complete changes of occupation and by continual changes of residence. When he died, he left behind him no wife, child or lifelong friend; . . . and with the exception of the 1907-9 Journal no papers of any considerable biographical value. He left instead a legend. In the Memoir which follows I have endeavored to recover and present the facts underlying the legend. Best known for what AE (George William Russell) called his 'noble translation of Plotinus', MacKenna nonetheless harbored views that collided with those of Plotinus, and so speaks to us as an authentic forerunner of the 'modern' human being, by which is meant those who, once their individual inner light is lit-and no matter how it may gutter in the wind of uncertain freedoms-must, even while hallowing earlier and magisterial records of paths of spiritual ascent, accept the need for a complete 'descent' (without which the whole engine of creation will have had no final purpose), with all the provisional darkness this may entail, so that the final ascent may be made in personal love and freedom. Clean, bright copy.
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.
Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 426 pages. How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim. Clean, bright copy.
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.
 "Additional Volume to the Works of Samual Johnson, LL.Dby: N/A")
 "Complex Vision, The by: Powys, John Cowper")
 "Elements of Refusalby: Zerzan, John")
 "Essays After Eightyby: Hall, Donald")
 "Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imaginationby: Siegel, Lee")
 "From the Angle of 88by: Philpotts, Eden")
 "In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (SIGNED COPY)by: Williams, C. K.")
 "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Landmarks In Rhetoric And Public Address) by: Blair, Hugh")
