Literature

Softcover. Simsbury CT, Mandel Vilar Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 221 pages plus 16 pages of photos. This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions--the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others. Advance Reader's Copy. Clean.

Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, SIGNED BY NAIPAUL. Like new condition in a bright dust jacket. The author's fourteenth and final novel.

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.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. In the teens and twenties, New York was home to a rich variety of literary subcultures. Within these intermingled worlds, gender lines and other boundaries were crossed in ways that were hardly imaginable in previous decades. Among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, the sophisticates of the Algonquin Round Table, and the literati of the Harlem Renaissance, certain women found fresh, powerful voices through which to speak and write. Enda St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker are now best remembered for their colorful lives; Genevieve Taggard, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Helene Johnson are hardly remembered at all. Yet each made a serious literary contribution to the meaning of modern femininity, relationship, and selfhood. Making Love Modern uncovers the deep historical sensitivity and interest in these women's love poetry. Light shelf wear. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Bowling Green Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 59 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. SIGNED and NUMBERED #824 of 1240. Pages darkening on edges, only light wear to cover boards.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 352 pages. Translated by Sam Taylor. As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an eleven-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier's fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious sixteen-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady. With a rhythm and intimacy to its prose characteristic of all de Rosnay's works, Manderley Forever is a vividly compelling portrait and celebration of an intriguing, hugely popular and (at the time) critically underrated writer.

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.

Softcover. University of Toronto Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 264 pages. Two critical discourses central to current Canadian literary theory emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s: post-colonialism as a political paradigm and postmodernism as a literary practice in Canadian and Quebecois fiction. Sylvia Soderlind considers the current debate about the relationship between these two discourses, and proposes a methodology that makes it possible to identify and distinguish between features pertaining to the two. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 1st Thus, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 106 pages. A Play with black & white illustrations by Faulkner. Clean, tight copy. Introduction by Noel Polk. In a bright yellow dust jacket.

Hardcover. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 214 pages. Minor shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy in excellent condition.

Hardcover. New York, Citadel Press, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w photographs. Edgewear, rubbing to price-clipped dust jacket; in brodart. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 537 pages. Slight edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with sunning to spine, 237 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front fly leaf. Herbert offers a fresh perspective on Melville's Typee by considering it in the context of his encounters with the natives (including being held captive for a time) in the Marquesan Islands. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, John Day Company, 1st, 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 177 pages. Boards illustrated with duotone illustration, black cloth binding, b&w illustrations by Covarrubias. Spine lightly cocked, light edgewear to covers, previous owner's signature to front endpaper, pages crisp and unmarked; overall, a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, First Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 249 pages. Hardcover. Grey cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic sleeve. Black & white illustrations, tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

Hardcover. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 272 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. This is the story of John McGahern's childhood, of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature.

Softcover. Merrick NY, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1st pbk, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages. Edited and translated from the Italian by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Ignazio Silone, anti-fascist and founding member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) offers a politically conscious and soul searching memoir which details his own PSI activities and the various factors engendering the "necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes." Over the course of his political career, Silone wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction works, and was imprisoned in Italy, France, Spain, and finally in Switzerland where he composed this memoir in 1942. Often compared with Andre Malraux and Albert Camus, Silone was awarded an honorary degree by Yale University, was a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. INSCRIBED BY PUGLIESE on the title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1st, 1854, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 385 pages. Embossed brown cloth covers w/ gilt lettering. Chips from top and bottom of spine. Rubbing to cover corners. Previous owner's signature inside front cover. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Panjandrum/Aris Books, 1st, April 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages plus index, b&w photographs. Light edge wear, rubbing to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, William Lewer, 1st, 1838, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in 3/4 leather with marbled boards, black calf spine labels with gilt lettering, 396 pages, American Edition noted on title page; its London parent, "The Metropolitan: A monthly journal of literature, science, and the fine arts" was a London monthly journal established by Thomas Campbell in 1831 and continued, under various editors, until 1850. Clean bright copy.

Softcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st pbk, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 261 pages. This edition contains diaries of 1948 and 1949. Country houses, some grand and some by no means as grand as their owners think they are, form the backdrop to an endlessly entertaining procession of people, even more varied than the houses. A clean copy of the fourth volume of JLM's diaries.