Literature

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 530 pages, b&w illustrations. The dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I-and a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers. When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century. Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today. Remainder mark on top edhge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 524 pages. The finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage by V.S. Naipaul - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume spanning some forty years of travel and sustained meditations on our world. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Seven Stories Press, reprint, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 237 pages. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns." Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 376 pages. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power. A first printing of the winner of the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 192 pages. Dr. Seuss's infectious rhymes, fanciful creatures, and roundabout plots not only changed the way children read but imagined the world. And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, Green Eggs and Ham,The Cat and the Hat, these and other classics have sold hundreds of millions of copies and entertained children and adults for decades.fter graduating from Dartmouth, Theodor Geisel used his talents as an ad-man, political provocateur, and social satirist, gradually but irrevocably turning to children's books. Theodor Geisel tells the unlikely story of this remarkable transformation. In this compact and engrossing biography, Donald Pease reveals the evolution of Dr. Seuss's creative persona while offering an honest appraisal of his life. The book also features many of Dr. Seuss's lesser-known illustrations, including college drawings, insecticide ads, and wartime political cartoons--all of which offer a glimpse of his early artistic style and the visual origins of the more famous creatures that later populated his children's books.As Pease traces the full arc of Dr. Seuss's prolific career, he combines close textual readings of many of Dr. Seuss's works with a unique look at their genesis to shed new light on the enduring legacy of America's favorite children's book author.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1t, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Color illustrations throughout.

Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1t, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Color illustrations throughout.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to some areas, 338 pages. Margaret Fuller - journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist - traveled in Europe between 1846 and 1850 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Her letters from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches, soon became moving accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. These dispatches are now reproduced in their entirety for the first time. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Spotless and clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 305 pages. In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 339 pages.

Hardcover. London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1st ed., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 331 pages. Blue cloth boards with gilt lettering along spine. Dust jacket has sticker on front flap. Dust jacket is also faded along spine with over all shelf wear. Otherwise, tight clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 512 pages. The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Concord MA, Albert Lane/Erudite Press, 2nd Ed., 1903, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray-green boards over green cloth spine, 35 pages, frontis. portrait plus 3 halftone plates. First published in 1890, "It is a pious duty to his memory to correct the errors of fact that were ... reported in the first edition of the Glimpse 1890." Jones was part of the rehabilitation of Thoreau's reputation and appreciation. Previous owner's bookmark on inside front cover, Paper label on spine mostly gone, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. New York, N.Y., Carlton Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 287 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st ed., 1982, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 220 pages. Purple cloth boards with gilt lettering along spine. Few pages of light pencil underlining. Dust jacket has some foxing, mainly on flaps, and discoloring. Tight copy. The idea of man as an essentially irrational being has preoccupied some of the most influential of Russian thinkers, including the three important Soviet writers considered by Dr Edwards in this book. Since the 1917 Revolution the polemic between rationalists and irrationalists has become directly relevant to the way life is lived in the Soviet Union, and a knowledge of the irrationalist point of view is essential for an understanding of much of Soviet literature and of the foundations of Soviet dissidence. As with other titles in this series, this book is not intended simply for the specialist. The broad speculations arising from the subject will fascinate all those who take a serious interest in the Russian literary tradition; a tradition whose principal figures have been concerned to reject philosophical and political creeds that, in seeking to produce a perfect human being in a perfect society, point in fact towards a vision of hell.

Hardcover. Gutersloh GR, C. Bertelsmann,, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 438 pages, chipped dust jacket. GERMAN TEXT. JULIA CHILD'S COPY with her signature, address and 1956 on the front fly leaf.

Hardcover. New York, Macmillan, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 161 pages. Blue cloth hardcover. Black & white illustrations by Marguerite Davis. Short stories selected by the Literature Committee of the Association for Childhood Education. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Light foxing to foredge. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 310 pages. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st US, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes with dust jackets in a cardboard slip case. Volume 1: 1847-1894, 396 pages. Vol. 2: 1895-1910, 397-755 pages. All bright and clean except for fading to dj spines. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcovers in dust jackets. 737 pages. Index. The dust jackets are faded on the spine. Edited by R.F. Christian. Vol. 1 1828-1879. Vol. 2 1880-1910. In a cardboard slipcase. Clean, bright set.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

Hardcover. Syracuse, N.Y., Syracuse University, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 241 pages. Light edge wear, soiling to price-clipped dust jacket. Foxing to top and fore-edge. Covers slightly warped. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped, lightly soiled dust jacket. Yellow cloth stamped in purple and black; 370 pages, illustrated with drawings by Leslie Saalburg. Here Gingrich, the publisher of Esquire, shares his feelings on food, automobiles, smoking pipes, violins, haberdashery and a litany of other esoteric subjects.