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.

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.