Literature

Hardcover. NY, Arrow Editions, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 146 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Light foxing to edges. Dust jacket with darkening, chipping along edges. Jacket now protected with clear plastic cover.

Softcover. UK, Oxford University Press, Revised Ed., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. Published here for the first time is much of a final and long-anticipated work on the philosophy of history by the great Oxford philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943). The original text of this uncompleted work has only recently been discovered and is accompanied here by Collingwood's shorter writings on historical knowledge and inquiry. Besides containing entirely new ideas, these incredible writings discuss many of the issues which Collingwood famously raised in The Idea of History and in his Autobiography. This book also includes two conclusions written by Collingwood, which were eventually revised and published as The Idea of Nature. and a lengthy editorial introduction that puts Collingwood's writings in their context and discusses the philosophical questions they initiate. A landmark publication, this work will appeal not only to those studying Collingwood but also to anyone broadly curious about philosophy of history. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Garden City, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 570 pages, b&w illustrations and frontispiece. Black cloth covers w/ edgewear, chipping. Previous owner's signature inside front cover. Else clean and tight.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In English at last, Borges's erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar Wilde. Writing for Harper's Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges: "A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings' kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of 'precursors,'cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges's works to have appeared posthumously." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 410 pages, b&w illustrations. Best known as the author of "Windows for the Crown Prince, " an account of her years as English tutor to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, Elizabeth Gray Vining now tells the full story of her life, including impressions of Japan that she omitted from her earlier book. Previous owner'e signature on Front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Arthur Baker, 1st, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, worn dust jacket with a large chunk gone from front panel. Book is bright and clean, 180 pages. Illustrated with color and b&w plates by John Leech. A biography of the novelist who wrote of country sports like hunting in a comical way.

Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with gilt and black title on spine, 353 pages. WITH THE AUTHOR'S INSCRIPTION pasted to front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket, 540 pages. A comprehensive collection of letters from Jarrell. Edited by his second wife Mary Jarrell with the assistance of Stuart Wright. Jarrell's letters span over fifty years and document his life, thoughts, and writing. The letters are insightful and often humorous, and provide a unique perspective on the author's life and work. Paper covered boards with a cloth spine, dust jacket with mild soil, stain. No markings.

Hardcover. Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 177 pages. Perhaps the most significant and influential figure in this century's wave of American realism, Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is credited not only with reviving the short story as an artistically legitimate form, but also with perfecting minimalist fiction. Moving chronologically through Carver's complete short fiction canon and examining key stories in depth, Ewing Campbell traces the author's development through and beyond literary minimalism, into the tradition of tragic allegory. He explores Carvers persistent use of myth and archetype; motifs of the grotesque; religious iconography; and oppressed, spiritually paralyzed characters. From the earliest stories through the latest, Campbell illuminates Carvers constant fascination with the way individuals connect or fail to connect with one another. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Scribner, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 578 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Pictures in center. Nice copy.

Hardcover. Surrey UK, Ashgate Publishing, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 165 pages. Author Leah Knight explores the physical and figurative potentials of green as they were understood in Renaissance England, including some that foreshadow our paradoxical dependence on and sacrifice of the green world. Ranging across contexts from early modern optics and olfaction to horticulture and herbal health care, this study explores a host of human encounters with the green world: both the impressions we make upon it and those it leaves with us. B&w, color illustrations.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a violet dust jacket with light fading to spine, 232 pages. A collection of essays exploring all aspects on a controversial English poet, the 17th century libertine, The Earl of Rochester. Different sections focus on sexual politics, on the poetry of intellect, and on Rochester and his contemporaries. Name, date and light pencil notations on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Knopf, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 219 pages. Clean, bright copy. "I doubt very much that I'm the only person who's finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields's own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can't name a more necessary or a more thrilling book.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 371 pages, b&w photos. Irving Howe?s 1964 description of Roth?s Call It Sleep as "one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American" catapulted Roth to fame. Yet the author?s decades-long silence became legendary. In following Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Steven Kellman has uncovered FBI files, spoken with family members and friends, and gained access to the tape in which Roth discussed the long-buried incest of his youth. Redemption is the Shakespearean saga of a great writer doomed to a life of psychological torment, but saved in the end by his search for deliverance. Clean copy.

Softcover. Ft., Texas Christian University, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 435 pages. INSCRIBED BY BONAZZI on the title page. This authorized biography by Robert Bonazzi, is based on John Howard Griffin's Journals from 1950-1980. Griffin was blinded in the South Seas during WWII, but regained sight in 1957, after which he wrote the classic Black Like Me. Bonazzi follows Griffin year by year after 1961, when Griffin toured the globe as a lecturer on human rights.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 12 page introduction by Peter Sabor plus a 56 page facsimile reprint of Sarah Fielding's (Henry"s sister) criticism of Samuel Richardson's novel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 509 pages. Remembrance offers the first sustained look at the author's life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade. Bradbury's correspondence was far-reaching--he interacted with a rich cross-section of 20th-Century cultural figures, writers, film directors, editors, and others who simply wanted insights or encouragement from a writer who had enriched their lives through his stories and novels. Bradbury scholar and biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, organized this volume into categories of correspondents, showing Bradbury's progression through life as he knew it, and not necessarily as the public perceived him. Letters to and from mentors and other writers are followed by correspondence with such film directors as John Huston, Francois Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Letters with publishers and agents are followed by letters that capture moments of national and international recognition, the shadows of war and family members who shared the memories of his life. Among the writers whose letters illuminate Remembrance are Theodore Sturgeon, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, Dan Chaon, Bernard Berenson, Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Anais Nin, Gore Vidal, Carl Sandburg, and Jessamyn West. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to the spine. "Cary Nelson performs an invaluable service to the reader by recovering the work of dozens of forgotten poets, especially women, blacks, and writers on the left, while making it clear that the texts we recover inevitably gain new meaning from their positioning within contemporary culture." Nicely illustrated in b&w and some color, mostly book jackets and title pages of books discussed. Some light pencil marking in margins.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement, and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This fascinating book by Matei Calinescu is the first to focus on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. Calinescu analyzes fictional works by Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, and Henry James, among others, explaining how reading texts is related both to symbolic play or make-believe and to games with rules. He reviews the history of reading in modern times, discussing, for example, how the Reformation led to rereadings of Scripture and how the proliferation of books during the Enlightenment led to a shift from "intensive reading" to "extensive reading." Calinescu looks at the distinctions between reading and rereading from the perspectives of the age, situation, and gender of the individual reader. He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a select audience of "secret sharers," or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues persuasively that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st pbk, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 123 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 227 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, else a clean, tight copy. Naipaul presents here four essays about the "half-made" societies, those still suffering from the profound deprivations of colonialism and prey to corruption." He examines the role of Eva Peron as the catalyst for violence in Argentina, with its yearning for a European culture and the physical, historical, cultural reality of the land in which the native Indians were wiped out and the colonialists took over. He writes of the infamous Michael X in Trinidad whose pretensions to power and destiny led to the man's insanity and execution following two pointless murders. Shorter essays address nihilism in the Congo and Naipaul's take on Joseph Conrad and the Heart of Darkness.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor MI, The University of Michigan Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 354 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on title page. Light pencil marking to 5 pages, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Lexington Books , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glazed boards, 299 pages. John McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. McWilliams provides close readings of some twenty historical novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions established by Scott's Waverley novels, showing both the continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott's narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of McWilliams's perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and achievement. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber & Faber, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth lettered in gilt at the spine. Illustrated with eight photographic plates. 422 pages. Extended passages from Jefferies' work, with a general introduction in two parts: 'The English Genius' and 'To the Two Types of Jefferies Readers', introductions to each section, notes on the text, and the Epigraph. No dust jacket, clean copy.