Literature

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 249 pages. Light edgewear and tanning to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 270 pages. In the early eighties, Jennie Erdal was hired by a flamboyant British publisher she calls Tiger to be his specialist editor for Russian books. By degrees he co-opted her time and loyalty, to the point where she ended up becoming his ghostwriter for a huge nonfiction book on women, two glossy novels, and hundreds of newspaper columns, all published under his own name. She also wrote any number of his love letters. With often ironic directness and quiet comedy, Erdal relates how she became seduced into this peculiar job. On the way she makes fascinating excursions into her own private history, from vivid evocations of her Scottish Presbyterian childhood to moving observations on being an abandoned wife and lone parent to piercing insights into the very nature of literary creation. One of the smartest books about writing in years, Ghosting is a tour de force in which the author renders both Tiger and herself as compelling characters, connected to each other by a strange symbiosis. Their interaction is bizarre and also quite spooky; in the end this is a book about the very nature of identity, literary and otherwise. Clean copy.

Softcover. Oakland CA, PM Press;, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. The first comprehensive account of how the rise of postwar youth culture was depicted in mass-market pulp fiction. As the young created new styles in music, fashion, and culture, pulp fiction shadowed their every move, hyping and exploiting their behavior, dress, and language for mass consumption and cheap thrills. With their lurid covers and wild, action-packed plots, these books reveal as much about society's deepest desires and fears as they do about the subcultures themselves. Featuring approximately 400 full-color covers, many of them never before reprinted, along with 70 in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, and previously unpublished articles, the book goes behind the scenes to look at the authors and publishers, how they worked, where they drew their inspiration and--often overlooked--the actual words they wrote. It is a must read for anyone interested in pulp fiction, lost literary history, retro and subcultural style, and the history of postwar youth culture.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Shoemaker & Hoard, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray boards with blue cloth spine, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions. James Salter is considered one of America's greatest prose stylists. The Arm of Flesh (later revised and retitled Cassada ) and his first novel, The Hunters, are legendary in military circles for their descriptions of flying and aerial combat. A former Air Force pilot who flew F-86 fighters in Korea, Salter writes with matchless insight about the terror and exhilaration of the pilot's life. This book collects passages from two other books he wrote about his military flight career and entries from his personal journal kept during his tours of military flying duty through flight training in late WWII, into combat duty in Korea in 1952, and through his post war flying up into the early 1960s. Masterfully edited by Jessica and William Benton, it has been organized chronologically and simply is wonderful. You can read from the journal entry, and then it is followed by fiction he created using that experience. No dust jacket, clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1st US, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 226 pages, illustrated in b&w by Edward Ardizzone. Blue cloth with an edgeworn, chipped dust jacket. The book is a very good, clean, tight copy. White's account of life on the west coast of Ireland. The author comments on the front flap: "God knows what this book is about. I suppose it's a bit of autobiography really. But it's about living on the West Coast of Ireland, in 'the parish nearest to America' -- they all are, I mean the parishes -- and it is about the people and things there, more than about me."

Hardcover. New York, Ammo, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages, many b&w and color photographs. A visual biography accompanied by excerpts from Thompson's work. Introduction by Johnny Depp, edited by Steve Crist and Paul Norton. Illustrated boards, no dust jacket issued.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Routledge, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 190 pages. This book examines Gore Vidal's lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing - sex, politics, and religion - this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal's portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal's other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967-2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal's careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 321 pages with an index. Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers. The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glazed boards, 205 pages. Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. Light scratch top rear cover, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 558 pages. Edited by Ian T. Macauley. An anthology of futuristic nonfiction essays by the best-selling author of 2001: A Space Odyssey spans more than sixty years of work in a collection, organized chronologically, that includes his prophetic predictions about geosynchronous satellites, space travel, and the Internet. Light sunning to spine, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. London, Vision Press Limited, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket, 240 pages. A full critical analysis of Grass' plays, poems and novels and viewed in the context of 20th century German literature. No markings.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 349 pages. 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, HarperCollins, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 572 pages. The author as written an admirable book that pulls no punches in recounting Hellman and Hammett's flaboyant lives and compulsions. like new in a protective brodart.

Softcover. Sarasota FL, Pineapple Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages. Follow Ernest Hemingway's exploits on the Bahamian island of Bimini from 1935 to 1937, the very moment in time when the International Game Fish Association (under the author's co-leadership) was emerging. Covers Hemingway's role in the formation of the IGFA, his underappreciated seminal writing about competitive saltwater angling when the sport was still in its infancy, the amazing fishing he enjoyed on the island, and the way all of these experiences translated into the composition of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream. This is the only book on this period in Hemingway's life and reveals unexpected dimensions to the Hemingway portrait that deserve attention, including his surprising humor, his advanced conservationist views several decades before the environmental movement even began, and his egalitarian ideas about his contemporary female counterparts in the big-game fishing world--challenging the usual portrait of Hemingway as a chauvinist with no personal rules, boundaries, or conscience. Includes beautiful vintage photographs of 1930s Bimini that have never been published in book form.

Softcover. Waitsfield VT, Vermont Crossroads Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, b&w illustrations. Originally published in hardcover in 1966. Harbor Springs in northern Michigan was where the Hemingway family vacationed from Chicago as early as 1900, when Ernest was age 1. Trips there followed during his youth and into his early years as a professional writer. The setting of Walloon Lake and the region and characters of Little Traverse Bay found their way into some of his stories. Includes three of Hemingway's short stories originally published in the Oak Park (Ill. ) High School Tabula, here reprinted for the first time. Mild wear, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley , University of California Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 455 pages. This biography of Henry Thoreau offers insight into his social activism, his interest in fine arts, William Gilpin and John Ruskin's influence on his nature writing, and his involvement in, and influence by, the Agassiz-Darwin debate over "The Origin of Species." Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, silver lettering, 152 pages. Light pencil marking in text.

Hardcover. Prague, Twisted Spoon Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly soiled dust jacket, 150 pages. B&w frontis. The works of the Czech Symbolist Otokar Brezina (1868-1929), a writer twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, influenced an entire generation of artists in Bohemia and Moravia. Hidden History (published posthumously in 1935) is one of the most important works of 20th century Czech prose and represents the apotheosis of Brezina's endeavors in the essay form. In this finely crafted collection, he discusses the role of art as a vanguard of developments in science and as a force for social change. These essays also contribute to an understanding of Brezina's poetry, for which he is better known. They comprise the most systematic exposition of his aesthetic creed, which served to inspire the Czech writers and literary critics who followed in his footsteps. This edition is the first complete English translation of any complete volume of Brezina's work. Afterword by Petr Holman. Light foxing, no markings.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages, a facsimile reprint of his fantastic tales first published in 1785. Horatio Walpole, also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. His literary reputation rests on his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. "The Hieroglyphic Tales were undoubtedly written a little before the creation of the world, and have ever since been preserved, by oral tradition, in the mountains of Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet discovered. Of these few facts we could have the most authentic attestations of several clergymen, who remember to have heard them repeated by old men long before they, the said clergymen, were born." (From Walpole's own ntroduction). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott , 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 251 pages. Hal Borland writes about his boyhood as part of a homesteading family in Eastern Colorado. A nice copy of the first edition, as stated on the copyright page. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.