Literature

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 162 pages. The first full-length critical treatment of this significant and neglected figure in American realism. Arguing that raw naturalism and subtle craftsmanship - seemingly incompatible qualities join to make Yates one of the most accomplished writers of the post - World War II period, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of his life and work. An introductory chapter outlines the historical, literary, and social contexts important to Yates's writings, comparing him, for example, with his contemporaries Philip Roth and Mary McCarthy and articulating strong lines of continuity between his themes and the ideas of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the Marxist-oriented socialist C. Wright Mills, and the social theoretician Erving Goffman. Next a thorough biographical portrait illuminates Yates's obsession with the American middle class and its dislocated, disordered, and psychologically stifled populace, followed by sharp readings of the novels and story collections, including unfinished and minor works. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 166 pages. Lardner was one of the most remarkable satirists in American literature and one of the sharpest cultural historians of his time but is better known to many people as a successful journalist and popular entertainer. Geismar examines the development of this distinguished writer, a biographical and critical account. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 310 pages. Gilt top edge. Light edge wear, rubbing to covers. Pencil marking to several pages and inside front cover. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. A young English novelist's journey through the Soviet Union in the early sixties (author also wrote "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner', "The General", and others. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 524 pages. Robert Graves was astonishingly prolific and worked in many genres. He wrote lyric poetry, scholarly studies of mythology, drama, criticism, and journalism, he translated from Latin, and is probably best known for his potboilers "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God," works that he considered purely commercial and took little interest in. And, as Miranda Seymour makes clear, he was as odd a duck as ever walked. His life was defined by the women to whom he devoted himself. "Abased himself" would perhaps be the better term. The first and most influential was the American Laura Riding, a second-rate poet who fancied herself some sort of prophetess who would save the world from war and turned Graves into her adoring puppy. Later in life Graves devoted himself to a series of young women, each of whom he claimed embodied "the goddess" in whose service he thought he dwelled. Seymour (a novelist herself) writes beautifully, and with the cooperation of key members of the Graves family she has produced what will surely be the definitive biography of Graves for years to come.

Hardcover. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with faded gilt lettering on spine. 191 pages, b&w frontis. of Hawker. Small name stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 402 pages. Biography of American poet Sylvia Plath, author of the autobiographical "The Bell Jar" (1932-1963). Illustrated with black and white photographs. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Hanover NH, Dartmouth College Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 277 pages. One of Rousseau?s later and most puzzling works and never before available in English, this neglected autobiographical piece was the product of the philosopher?s old age and sense of persecution. Long viewed simply as evidence of his growing paranoia, it consists of three dialogues between a character named ?Rousseau? and one identified only as ?Frenchman? who discuss the bad reputation and works of an author named ?Jean-Jacques.? Dialogues offers a fascinating retrospective of his literary career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Brattleboro, VT, Stephen Daye Press, 2nd Printing, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, 39 pages, dust jacket edge fade and small chunks missing, otherwise, internally very clean and tight.

Hardcover. Bennington VT, Images from the Past, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Rudyard Kipling in Vermont tells the story of the dynamic years 1892-1896 with Kipling's own letters and memoirs, selected excerpts from his poetry, and the words of those who knew and admired him. More than thirty illustrations illustrate the little-known tale of a time he said "would be blessed to me for all my life." Kipling was born in Bombay, India, and was a prolific writer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He married an American wife and moved to the village of Brattleboro, VT. He only lived in Vermont for four years. But during that time he wrote his famous "Jungle Book" series. Family troubles forced him to move and the large estate he lived in over looking town fell into disrepair. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth, 119 pages. B&w line illustrations by Bernadine Custer. Rudyard Kipling lived with his wife on a small estate in Dummerston, Vermont, in a house they built called Naulakha, from 1892 to 1896. It was while he was here that he wrote both "The Jungle Book" and "Captains Courageous". Kipling would have been content to live out his life there but in 1896, a dispute arose between the Kiplings an a neighbor led to a court case and the Kiplings left Vermont never to return. This volume, written by a Dummerston native and historian, tells the story of that dispute. Lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. NY, John Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1937, Hardcover, red cloth. 119 pages, drawings by Bernadine Custer. Told for the first time, 40 years after author Rudyard Kipling and his family hurriedly left their home in Vermont, this story fills some blank pages in Kipling's life story. Author Fredric Van de Water had heard the true account from Kipling's brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, which followed smoldering tensions and a public trial. The Kiplings left in 1896, never to return. Several of Kipling's writings were put to paper in the Vermont home. First trade edition after a limited edition of 700. Clean.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons."

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press , 1st, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 292 pages. Light edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1st, 1936, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 148 pages. Black & white illustrations by Rockwell Kent. 1st edition review copy. "Review Copy" with date and price stamped on front endpaper. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Tanning along top edge of pages. Darkening to spine, and top edges of covers. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Fayetteville AK, University of Arkansas Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 131 pages. Ciardi records his days and nights as a gunner on a B-29 in the South Pacific during four of the last terrible months of World War II. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a pric-clipped dust jacket that has a bright red cover but fading to spine. 372 pages, clean copy. Describes the influence of Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers. The growth of that influence among Mexican-Americans and many other concerned Americans. The years when Chavez called for boycotts, and the greatest agricultural labor strike in U.S. and the greatest agricultural labor strike in U.S. history, the struggle for justice and a means to reverse the order of the system. A book about the man. Cesar Chavez.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 194 pages. Includes a bibliography of Bannerman's books and 47 reproductions of the first British and first American editions and her illustrations for them. Phyllis Yuill and Justin Schiller helped with the publishing history and supplied illustrations. Hay shows that it was the illustrations of later artists that provoked the controversy over THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO, not Bannerman's original text or pictures. Bound in the original gilt-stamped red boards. From the dust jacket: "This first biography of Helen Bannerman covers much new ground and is based on the vast collection of letters to the children, usually lovingly illustrated, in the possession of the Bannerman family. As well as telling the story of one of the most popular children's books of all time, Elizabeth Hay's biography offers an intimate picture of the daily life of a British memsahib in the heyday of the Raj." Clean copy.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 188 pages. SIGNED BY OFFUTT on title-page.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt stamping, 85 pages. First edition, first printing with date to title page matching that copyright page. Seven b&w plates by the author. A 1926 work by Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran. It contains eighty-five pages of aphorisms, poems, and parables that demonstrate Gibran's characteristic ability to masterfully encapsulate profound concepts in just two or three lines. Gilt lettering on spine faded. There is a previous owner's name in red ink on the front fly leaf, otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1st Edition, 1860, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 267 pages. Hardcover. Black cloth cover boards, Blind-stamped with decoration, gilt title on spine. Very Good condition. Rubs to the corners and spine tips. Gilt top edge (faded). Edges and pages have tanning from age. Dark endpapers. Binding good. Spine straight. Pages unmarked except title page with original owner's name and address in top right corner. 19 tales.

Hardcover. Francestown NH, Marshall Jones Company, 3rd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth stamped in gilt. Dust jacket edgeworn, chipped. 295 pages. Revised Edition. Third Printing. INSCRIBED by Rosamond Thaxter ("Rosie") on half title page.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Introduction by Vincent Carrata plus 52 pages. Facsimile reprints. Clean copy.