| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
books tagged “20c”
books tagged “20c”
›› Find signed collectible books by ''
English
-
The Age of Innocenceby Edith Wharton, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Laura Dluzynski QuinnISBN 014018970X (0-14-018970-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Innocence'Book summary:Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever liars always come up with good stories to back up their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of insight that makes The Age of Innocence so indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any in history. [via]
-
At Swim-Two-Birdsby Flann O'BrienISBN 0141182687 (0-14-118268-7)
Hardcover, Penguin Uk
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'At Swim-Two-Birds'Book summary:If you try to read it too closely, the structure of this book will drive you crazy. Ask me how I know. On the first level, it seems to emanate from the addled mind of a navel-gazing Irish university student stumbling around thinking about writing a book or a school paper. As I said, you can go nuts trying to follow it. Yet At Swim-Two-Birds is a modernist masterpiece, the best-known fictional work of Irish newspaper writer Flann O'Brien. Published in 1939, the book's great charm is O'Brien's constant reinvention of the English language, fueled and altered by an Irish sensibility and language; the sentences come out in a torrent of musical, drunken ramblings. [via]
More editions of At Swim-Two-Birds:
-
Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thoughtby Hannah ArendtISBN 0140186506 (0-14-018650-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought'Book summary:Arendt's penetrating observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute a major contribution to political philosophy. In this book she describes the perplexing crises which modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. [via]
More editions of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought:
Billiards at Half-Past Nineby Heinrich BöllISBN 0140187243 (0-14-018724-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Billiards at Half-Past Nine'More editions of Billiards at Half-Past Nine:
The Bloody Chamber and Other Storiesby Angela CarterISBN 014017821X (0-14-017821-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories'More editions of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories:
-
The Castle: Classic Collectionby Franz Kafka, Idris Parry, J. A. UnderwookISBN 0140185046 (0-14-018504-6)
Softcover, Penguin Uk
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Castle: Classic Collection'Book summary:They are perhaps the most famous literary instructions never followed: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread...." Thankfully, Max Brod did not honor his friend Franz Kafka's final wishes. Instead, he did everything within his power to ensure that Kafka's work would find publication--including making some sweeping changes in the original texts. Until recently, the world has known only Brod's version of Kafka, with its altered punctuation, word order, and chapter divisions. Restoring much of what had previously been expunged, as well as the fluid, oral quality of Kafka's original German, Mark Harman's new translation of The Castle is a major literary event.
One of three unfinished novels left after Kafka's death, The Castle is in many ways the writer's most enduring and influential work. In Harman's muscular translation, Kafka's text seems more modern than ever, the words tumbling over one another, the sentences separated only by commas. Harman's version also ends the same way as Kafka's original manuscript--that is, in mid-sentence: "She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said--." For anyone used to reading Kafka in his artificially complete form, the effect is extraordinary; it is as if Kafka himself had just stepped from the room, leaving behind him a work whose resolution is the more haunting for being forever out of reach. [via]
More editions of The Castle: Classic Collection:
-
Collected Poems, 1909-1962by T. S. EliotISBN 0151189781 (0-15-118978-1)
Hardcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Poems, 1909-1962'Book summary:There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.
Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. [via]
More editions of Collected Poems, 1909-1962:
-
Complete Poems and Playsby T. S. EliotISBN 015121185X (0-15-121185-X)
Hardcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Poems and Plays'Book summary:Eliot's poetry ranges from the massively magisterial ( The Waste Land), to the playfully pleasant ( Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats). This volume of Eliot's poetry and plays offers the complete text of these and most all of Eliot's poetry, including the full text of Four Quartets. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Eliot exerted a profound influence on his contemporaries in the arts generally and this collection makes his genius clear. [via]
More editions of Complete Poems and Plays:
-
Crucibleby Arthur Miller, Gerald Clifford WealesISBN 0140247726 (0-14-024772-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Crucible'Book summary:Release Date: October 28, 1976. The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft-and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witchhunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can. "A drama of emotional power and impact" -New York Post [via]
More editions of Crucible:
- The Crucible: ISBN 0140481389 (0-14-048138-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - Crucible: ISBN 0142437336 (0-14-243733-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - Crucible: ISBN 0140155074 (0-14-015507-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Crucible: ISBN 0140189645 (0-14-018964-5)
Softcover, Penguin USA - Crucible: ISBN 0140247726 (0-14-024772-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- The Crucible: ISBN 0140481389 (0-14-048138-9)
-
The Crucible : A Play in Four Actsby Arthur Miller, Richard EyreISBN 014200099X (0-14-200099-X)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crucible : A Play in Four Acts'Book summary:The Crucible, Arthur Miller's classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, is returning to Broadway. To mark the occasion, Penguin is pleased to offer this beautiful hardcover edition.
"A powerful drama." (Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times) [via]More editions of The Crucible : A Play in Four Acts:
-
The Crucible : A Screenplayby Arthur MillerISBN 0140259090 (0-14-025909-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crucible : A Screenplay'Book summary:The masterpiece of American drama is now a major motion picture from 20th Century Fox, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Paul Scofield. Set during the witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, The Crucible recounts the vengeance, mass hysteria, and collective evil that poisoned this small town. photos, some in color. [via]
More editions of The Crucible : A Screenplay:
The Discovery of Heavenby Harry Mulisch, Paul VincentISBN 0140239375 (0-14-023937-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Discovery of Heaven'More editions of The Discovery of Heaven:
-
The Education of Henry Adamsby Henry Adams, Jean GooderISBN 0140445579 (0-14-044557-9)
Softcover, Penguin USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Education of Henry Adams'Book summary:Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.
It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.
Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.
He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus [via]
More editions of The Education of Henry Adams:
-
Eyre Affairby Jasper FfordeISBN 0142001805 (0-14-200180-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Eyre Affair'Book summary:Is this on your summer reading list? [via]
More editions of Eyre Affair:
-
The Grapes of Wrathby John Steinbeck, Peter Lisca, Kevin HearleISBN 0140247750 (0-14-024775-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Grapes of Wrath'Book summary:When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.
The prize must have come, at least in part, because alongside the poverty and dispossession, Steinbeck chronicled the Joads' refusal, even inability, to let go of their faltering but unmistakable hold on human dignity. Witnessing their degeneration from Oklahoma farmers to a diminished band of migrant workers is nothing short of crushing. The Joads lose family members to death and cowardice as they go, and are challenged by everything from weather to the authorities to the California locals themselves. As Tom Joad puts it: "They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."
The point, though, is that decency remains intact, if somewhat battle-scarred, and this, as much as the depression and the plight of the "Okies," is a part of American history. When the California of their dreams proves to be less than edenic, Ma tells Tom: "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on." It's almost as if she's talking about the very novel she inhabits, for Steinbeck's characters, more than most literary creations, do go on. They continue, now as much as ever, to illuminate and humanize an era for generations of readers who, thankfully, have no experiential point of reference for understanding the depression. The book's final, haunting image of Rose of Sharon--Rosasharn, as they call her--the eldest Joad daughter, forcing the milk intended for her stillborn baby onto a starving stranger, is a lesson on the grandest scale. "'You got to,'" she says, simply. And so do we all. --Melanie Rehak [via]
More editions of The Grapes of Wrath:
- The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0140281622 (0-14-028162-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0142000663 (0-14-200066-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0143039431 (0-14-303943-1)
Softcover, Penguin Classics - The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0140155082 (0-14-015508-2)
Softcover, Penguin USA - The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0140186409 (0-14-018640-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0140247750 (0-14-024775-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- The Grapes of Wrath: ISBN 0140281622 (0-14-028162-2)
-
Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969by Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Lotte Kohler, Hans SanerISBN 0151078874 (0-15-107887-4)
Hardcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969'Book summary:The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jaspers's "inner emigration, " and it is resumed immediately after World War II. The initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship, in which Jasper's wife, Gertrud, is soon included and then Arendt's husband, Heinrich Blucher. These letters show not only the way both philosophers lived, thought, and worked but also how they experienced the postwar years. Since neither ever dreamed that this correspondence would be published, and each had absolute trust in the other, they reveal themselves here - for the first time - in a personal and spontaneous way. Brilliant, vulnerable, forthright, Arendt speaks about America, her adopted country. About American universities, American politics from McCarthyism to Kennedy, American urban decay. She speaks about Germany, the country she left: its anti-Semitism, its guilt for the Holocaust, its politics. And about Israel, which she always supported as a Jew but also criticized, especially in her controversial book about the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In his dialogue with Arendt, the thoughtful, generous, concerned Jaspers considers the question of the German essence, and of the Jewish character. He speaks about philosophers past and present - Spinoza, Heidegger. About old age and retirement. Corrupt journalism. Suicide. Man's future on this planet. Here is a fascinating dialogue between a woman and a man, a Jew and a German, a questioner and a visionary, both uncompromising in their examination of our troubledcentury.[via]More editions of Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969:
-
The Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad, R. G. HampsonISBN 0140186522 (0-14-018652-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heart of Darkness'Book summary:A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness exposes the tenuous fabric that holds "civilization" together and the brutal horror at the center of European colonialism. Conrad's crowning achievement recounts Marlow's physical and psychological journey deep into the heart of the Belgian Congo in search of the mysterious trader Kurtz.[via]
@JungleFever Heading down to Africa on a boat. Too hot! I get the creeping sense this job isnt going to be as cushy as they made it sound.
The natives seem unhappy. Some are even violent! Why dont they appreciate how much weve done for them? Ungrateful welfare leeches, I say!
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or LessMore editions of The Heart of Darkness:
- The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140281630 (0-14-028163-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140180907 (0-14-018090-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140240179 (0-14-024017-9)
Softcover, Penguin USA - The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140431683 (0-14-043168-3)
Softcover, Penguin USA - The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140186522 (0-14-018652-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- The Heart of Darkness: ISBN 0140281630 (0-14-028163-0)
-
Heart of Darkness and Other Talesby Joseph Conrad, Cedric WattsISBN 0192801724 (0-19-280172-4)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness and Other Tales'Book summary:The finest of all Conrad's tales, Heart of Darkness is set in an atmosphere of mystery and menace, and tells of Marlow's perilous journey up the Congo River to relieve his employer's agent, the renowned and formidable Mr. Kurtz. What he sees on his journey, and his eventual encounter with Kurtz, horrify and perplex him, and call into question the very bases of civilization and human nature. Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted for film, radio, and television, the story shows Conrad at his most intense and sophisticated. The other three tales in this volume depict corruption and obsession, and question racial assumptions. Set in the exotic surroundings of Africa, Malaysia, and the east, they variously appraise the glamour, folly, and rapacity of imperial adventure. This revised edition uses the English first edition texts and has a new chronology and bibliography. [via]
More editions of Heart of Darkness and Other Tales:
Herzogby Saul BellowISBN 0142437298 (0-14-243729-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Herzog'Book summary:A novel complex, compelling, absurd and realistic, Herzog became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1964. In it Saul Bellow tells the tale of Moses E. Herzog, a tragically confused intellectual who suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle part of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by sending out a series of letters to all kinds of people. The letters in total constitute a thoughtful examination of his own life and that which has occurred around him. What emerges is not always pretty, but serves as gritty foundation for this absorbing novel. [via]
-
Homage to Cataloniaby George OrwellISBN 0156421178 (0-15-642117-8)
Softcover, Harvest Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Homage to Catalonia'Book summary:"I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets." Most war correspondents observe wars and then tell stories about the battles, the soldiers and the civilians. George Orwell--novelist, journalist, sometime socialist--actually traded his press pass for a uniform and fought against Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War during 1936 and 1937. He put his politics and his formidable conscience to the toughest tests during those days in the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain. Then, after nearly getting killed, he went back to England and wrote a gripping account of his experiences, as well as a complex analysis of the political machinations that led to the defeat of the socialist Republicans and the victory of the Fascists. [via]
More editions of Homage to Catalonia:
-
If on a Winter's Night a Travelerby Italo CalvinoISBN 0156439611 (0-15-643961-1)
Softcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'Book summary:If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]
More editions of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:
-
The Interpretation of Dreamsby Sigmund Freud, Ritchie Robertson, Joyce CrickISBN 0192100491 (0-19-210049-1)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Interpretation of Dreams'Book summary:One hundred years ago Sigmund Freud published The Interpretations of Dreams, a book that, like Darwin's The Origin of Species, revolutionized our understanding of human nature. Now this groundbreaking new translation--the first to be based on the original text published in November 1899--brings us a more readable, more accurate, and more coherent picture of Freud's masterpiece.
The first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams is much shorter than its subsequent editions; each time the text was reissued, from 1909 onwards, Freud added to it. The most significant, and in many ways the most unfortunate addition, is a 50-page section devoted to the kind of mechanical reading of dream symbolism--long objects equal male genitalia, etc.--that has gained popular currency and partially obscured Freud's more profound insights into dreams. In the original version presented here, Freud's emphasis falls more clearly on the use of words in dreams and on the difficulty of deciphering them. Without the strata of later additions, readers will find here a clearer development of Freud's central ideas--of dream as wish-fulfillment, of the dream's manifest and latent content, of the retelling of dreams as a continuation of the dreamwork, and much more. Joyce Crick's translation is lighter and faster-moving than previous versions, enhancing the sense of dialogue with the reader, one of Freud's stylistic strengths, and allowing us to follow Freud's theory as it evolved through difficult cases, apparently intractable counter-examples, and fascinating analyses of Freud's own dreams.
The restoration of Freud's classic is a major event, giving us in a sense a new work by one of this century' most startling, original, and influential thinkers. [via]More editions of The Interpretation of Dreams:
-
Jacob's Roomby Virginia Woolf, Sue RoeISBN 0140185704 (0-14-018570-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jacob's Room'Book summary:Jacob Flanders is a young man passing from adolescence to adulthood in a hazy rite of passage. From his boyhood on the windswept shores of Cornwall to his days as a student at Cambridge, his elusive, chameleon-like character is gradually revealed in a stream of loosely related incidents and impressions: whether through his mother's letters, his friend's conversations, or the thoughts of the women who adore him. Then we glimpse him as a young man, caught under the glare of a London streetlamp. It is 1914, he is twenty-six, and Europe is on the brink of war ! This tantalizing novel heralded Woolf's bold departure from the traditional methods of the novel, with its experimental play between time and reality, memory and desire. [via]
John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrathby Frank GalatiISBN 0140482326 (0-14-048232-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath'More editions of John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath:
Letters : 1925-1975by Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Andrew Shields, Ursula LudzISBN 0151005257 (0-15-100525-7)
Hardcover, Harcourt Trade Publishers
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters : 1925-1975'More editions of Letters : 1925-1975:
-
Libraby Don DelilloISBN 0140156046 (0-14-015604-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Libra'Book summary:In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.[via]A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
More editions of Libra:
-
The Longest Journeyby E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Heine, Gilbert AdairISBN 0141441488 (0-14-144148-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Longest Journey'Book summary:E. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.[via]More editions of The Longest Journey:
-
Lord Jimby Joseph Conrad, Robert Hampson, Penguin Books, Copyright Paperback Collection (Library of Congress), Cedric Thomas WattsISBN 0140431691 (0-14-043169-1)
Softcover, Penguin Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lord Jim'Book summary:Lord Jim (1900): Jim is one of Conrad's most complex creations, and Conrad explores, along the vast horizon of this gorgeous novel, the phenomena of shame, guilt, retribution -- and redemption. How right it is for our times!
Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad's supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives. V.S. Pritchett wrote, "Nostromo is the most strikingly modern of Conrad's novels. It is pervaded by a profound, even morbid sense of insecurity which is the very spirit of our age." [via]
-
Lord Jim : A Taleby Joseph Conrad, Robert Hampson, Cedric P. WattsISBN 0140180923 (0-14-018092-3)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lord Jim : A Tale'Book summary:When Lord Jim first appeared in 1900, many took Joseph Conrad to task for couching an entire novel in the form of an extended conversation--a ripping good yarn, if you like. (One critic in The Academy complained that the narrator "was telling that after-dinner story to his companions for eleven solid hours.") Conrad defended his method, insisting that people really do talk for that long, and listen as well. In fact his chatty masterwork requires no defense--it offers up not only linguistic pleasures but a timeless exploration of morality.
The eponymous Jim is a young, good-looking, genial, and naive water-clerk on the Patna, a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He is, we are told, "the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck." He also harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism--which are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Acting on impulse, Jim jumps overboard and lands in a lifeboat, which happens to be bearing the unscrupulous captain and his cohorts away from the disaster. The Patna, however, manages to stay afloat. The foundering vessel is towed into port--and since the officers have strategically vanished, Jim is left to stand trial for abandoning the ship and its 800 passengers.
Stripped of his seaman's license, convinced of his own cowardice, Jim sets out on a tragic and transcendent search for redemption. This may sound like the bleakest of narratives. But Lord Jim is also touching, elevating, and often funny. Here, for example, the narrator describes the ship's captain (proving that clothes do indeed make the man):
He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled sleeping suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand a man like that hasn't a ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes.
This is formidable prose by any standard. But when you consider that Conrad was working in his third language, the sublime after-dinner story that is Lord Jim seems even more astonishing an accomplishment. --Teri Kieffer [via]More editions of Lord Jim : A Tale:
-
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmareby G. K. ChestertonISBN 0140183884 (0-14-018388-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare'Book summary:In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."
But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.
Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried [via]More editions of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare:
The Middle of the Journeyby Lionel TrillingISBN 015159547X (0-15-159547-X)
Hardcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Middle of the Journey'More editions of The Middle of the Journey:
-
Midnight's Childrenby Salman RushdieISBN 0140283390 (0-14-028339-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Midnight's Children'Book summary:Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of Midnight's Children:
Murther and Walking Spiritsby Robertson DaviesISBN 0140168842 (0-14-016884-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Murther and Walking Spirits'More editions of Murther and Walking Spirits:
-
My Antoniaby Willa Cather, John J. Murphy, Wladyslaw T. BendaISBN 0140187642 (0-14-018764-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'My Antonia'Book summary:It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.
Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboardby Joseph ConradISBN 014018371X (0-14-018371-X)
Softcover, Viking Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Nostromo a Tale of the Seaboard'More editions of Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard:
-
The Odes of Pindarby PindarISBN 014044209X (0-14-044209-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Odes of Pindar'Book summary:This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. [via]
More editions of The Odes of Pindar:
On Revolutionby Hannah ArendtISBN 014018421X (0-14-018421-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'On Revolution'Book summary:Tracing the gradual evolution of revolutions since the American and French examples, Arendt predicts the changing relationship between war and revolution and the crucial role such combustive movements will play in the future of international relations.[via]-
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nestby Ken Kesey, John Clark PrattISBN 0140236015 (0-14-023601-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'Book summary:An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s.[via]A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.
More editions of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest:
- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 014028334X (0-14-028334-X)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0141181222 (0-14-118122-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0140155090 (0-14-015509-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0142000744 (0-14-200074-4)
Softcover, Penguin USA - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 0140236015 (0-14-023601-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: ISBN 014028334X (0-14-028334-X)
-
Orlando: A Biographyby Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey, Maria DibattistaISBN 0156031515 (0-15-603151-5)
Softcover, Harvest Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Orlando: A Biography'Book summary:In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon. [via]
-
The Penguin Guide To Jazz On Cdby Richard Cook, Brian MortonISBN 0141014164 (0-14-101416-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Penguin Guide To Jazz On Cd'Book summary:This work is a leading guide to recorded jazz, full of information and often trenchant criticism. For this edition, Richard Cook and Brian Morton have reassessed each artist's entry and updated the text to incorporate thousands of additional CDs. The book contains artist biographies, full line-ups, recording information along with details of labels and catalogue numbers, authoritative critical ratings, and full index of artists. The book should be of interest to aficionados and jazz novices alike. [via]
More editions of The Penguin Guide To Jazz On Cd:
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Cd, Lp and Cassetteby Richard Cook, Brian MortonISBN 0140179496 (0-14-017949-6)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Cd, Lp and Cassette'More editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Cd, Lp and Cassette:
-
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Discby Richard Cook, Brian MortonISBN 014051368X (0-14-051368-X)
Softcover, Penguin USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Disc'Book summary:What was the line-up at John Coltrane's Village Vanguard sessions? What is John Zorn's most important contribution to contemporary jazz? When was Jelly Roll Morton recorded for the Library of Congress? Where can you find a complete set of Ella Fitzgerald's many songbook recordings? Leading critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton answer these and a myriad other questions in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD -- the most comprehensive critical guide to jazz recordings available. Updated with revised artists' entries and thousands of additional CDs, the fourth edition includes:
-- listings for over 10,000 discs
-- musical and biographical details
-- full line-ups
-- accurate label and number details
-- authoritative critical ratings [via]More editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on Compact Disc:
-
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordingsby Brian Morton, Richard CookISBN 0141023279 (0-14-102327-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings'Book summary:The leading guide to recorded jazz, now extensively revised
Music fans have been turning to this established reference through seven editions as a source of intelligent and insightful criticism. Fully updated to incorporate thousands of additional recordings, the eighth edition features artist biographies, detailed recording information with labels and catalog numbers, reliable and authoritative ratings, the authors' personal selection of the essential recordings for every collection, an index of artists, and more. [via]More editions of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings:
The Political Thought of Hannah Arendtby Margaret CanovanISBN 0151728151 (0-15-172815-1)
Hardcover, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt'More editions of The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt:
-
The Return of the Nativeby Thomas HardyISBN 0140435182 (0-14-043518-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Return of the Native'Book summary:This fine novel sets in opposition two of Thomas Hardy's most unforgettable creations: his heroine, the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye, and the solemn, majestic stretch of upland in Dorsetshire he called Egdon Heath. The famous opening reveals the haunting power of that dark, forbidding moon where proud Eustacia fervently awaits a clandestine meeting with her lover, Damon Wildeve. But Eustacia's dreams of escape are not to be realized--neither Wildeve nor the retuming native Clym Yeobright can bring her salvation. Injured by forces beyond their control, Hardy's characters struggle vainly in the net of destiny. In the end, only the face of the lonely heath remains untouched by fate in this masterpiece of tragic passion, a tale that perfectly epitomizes the author's own unique and melancholy genius. [via]
More editions of The Return of the Native:
-
The Shadow Lineby Joseph ConradISBN 0140180974 (0-14-018097-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shadow Line'Book summary:A young and inexperienced sea captain finds that his first command leaves him with a ship stranded in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever. As he wrestles with his conscience and with the increasing sense of isolation that he experiences, the captain crosses the 'shadow-line' between youth and adulthood. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, Conrad's novella was written at the start of the Great War when his son Borys was at the Western Front, and can be seen as an attempt to open humanity's eyes to the qualities needed to face evil and destruction. [via]
-
Small Worldby David LodgeISBN 0140244867 (0-14-024486-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Small World'Book summary:The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledygook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny roman a' English department. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humor and spoofiness: it's an insider's view of things -- always the best kind -- and it takes its old-fashioned time telling a story, complete with reasonable digressions about the state of literary criticism and what may or may not be a realistic view of the academic life. [via]
More editions of Small World:
Therapyby David LodgeISBN 0140249001 (0-14-024900-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Therapy'More editions of Therapy:
Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversionby Bernard Shaw, Dan H. LaurenceISBN 0140437924 (0-14-043792-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion'More editions of Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion:
- Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion: ISBN 0140450289 (0-14-045028-9)
Softcover, Penguin USA - Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion: ISBN 0140437924 (0-14-043792-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion: ISBN 0140450289 (0-14-045028-9)
-
The Time Traveler's Wifeby Audrey NiffeneggerISBN 015602943X (0-15-602943-X)
Softcover, Harvest Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Time Traveler's Wife'Book summary:A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come. [via]
More editions of The Time Traveler's Wife:
-
Twenty Years at Hull-House : With Autobiographical Notesby Jane Addams, Ruth Sidel, Norah HamiltonISBN 0141180994 (0-14-118099-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Twenty Years at Hull-House : With Autobiographical Notes'Book summary:While on a trip to East London in 1883, Jane Addams witnessed a distressing scene late one night: masses of poor people were bidding on rotten vegetables that were unsalable anywhere else.
Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless, and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.
This scene haunted Addams for the next two years as she traveled through Europe, and she hoped to find a way to ease such suffering. Five years later, she visited Toynbee Hall, a London settlement house, and resolved to replicate the experiment in the U.S. On September 18, 1889, Jane Addams and her friend Ellen Starr moved into the second floor of a rundown mansion in Chicago's West Side. From the outset, they imagined Hull-House as a "center for a higher civic and social life" in the industrial districts of the city. Addams, Starr, and several like-minded individuals lived and worked among the poor, establishing (among other things) art classes, discussion groups, cooperatives, a kindergarten, a coffee house, a lending library, and a gymnasium. In a time when many well-to-do Americans were beginning to feel threatened by immigrants, Hull-House embraced them, showed them the true meaning of democracy, and served as a center for philanthropic efforts throughout Chicago.
Hull-House also provided an outlet for the energies of the first generation of female college graduates, who were educated for work yet prevented from doing it. In some respects, however, Addams's impressive work, often hailed by historians as "revolutionary," was nothing of the sort. She embraced the sexual stereotypes of her day, and, though she was clearly an independent woman, soothed public fears by acting primarily in the traditional roles of nurturer and caregiver. Hull-House was a rousing success, and it inspired others to follow in Addams's footsteps.
Though Twenty Years at Hull-House is meant to be an autobiography, it is Hull-House itself that stands in the spotlight. Addams devotes the first third of the book to her upbringing and influences, but the remainder focuses on the organization she built--and the benefits accruing to those who work with the poor as well as to the poor themselves. At times Addams's prose is difficult to follow, but her ideals and her actions are truly inspiring. A classic work of history--and a model for today's would-be philanthropists. --Sunny Delaney [via]
More editions of Twenty Years at Hull-House : With Autobiographical Notes:
Up from Slavery: An Autobiographyby Booker T. WashingtonISBN 0140390510 (0-14-039051-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Up from Slavery: An Autobiography'More editions of Up from Slavery: An Autobiography:
-
The Voyage Outby Virginia Woolf, Jane WheareISBN 0140185631 (0-14-018563-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Voyage Out'Book summary:Woolfs first novel is a haunting book, full of light and shadow. It takes Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose and their niece, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London to a resort on the South american coast. It is a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South americanca not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an americanca whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis (E. M. Forster).[via] -
Wavesby Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey, Molly HiteISBN 0156031574 (0-15-603157-4)
Softcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Waves'Book summary:One of Woolfs most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.[via] -
Winesburg, Ohioby Sherwood AndersonISBN 0140186557 (0-14-018655-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Winesburg, Ohio'Book summary:A collection of short stories dealing with a small town in Ohio. [via]
The Witch of Exmoorby Margaret DrabbleISBN 0156006049 (0-15-600604-9)
Softcover, Harcourt
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Witch of Exmoor'Book summary:In a profoundly moving, intellectually acute novel (Philadelphia Inquirer) that is as meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh (Los Angeles Times), Margaret Drabble conjures up a retired writer besieged by her three grasping children in this dazzling, wickedly gothic tale.[via]More editions of The Witch of Exmoor:
Spanish
-
Las Uvas De LA Iraby John Steinbeck, Maria CoyISBN 0142002534 (0-14-200253-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Las Uvas De LA Ira'Book summary:[via]Las uvas de la ira es un hito en la literatura norteamericana que explora el conflicto entre ricos y pobres, analiza la reacción feroz de un hombre contra la injusticia y el estoicismo de una mujer igualmente heróica, y refleja los horrores de la Gran Depresión. Aunque sigue la migración de miles personas del Dust Bowl, Las uvas de la ira se enfoca en la historia de una familia de Oklahoma, los Joads, echados de su hogar y forzados a viajar rumbo a esa Tierra Prometida que era por ese entoncesy que de algun modo sigue siendoCalifornia. De sus desventurasen un país dividido surge un drama sobre la dignidad humana, a un tiempo trágico y majestuoso en su grandeza su valentía moral.
Publicada por primera vez en 1939, la novela reflejó su época como Uncle Tom's Cabin reflejó los años antes de la Guerra Civil norteamericana. John Steinbeck, un escritor que simpatizaba con la crítica fascista y comunista, insistió en que la versión integral del "Himno de batalla de la República" fuese impresa en la primera edición del libro, que adopta en su título unas palabras del primer verso: "Está pisoteando la vendimia donde se conservan las uvas de la ira." La crónica de Steinbeck sobre el avergonzante maltrato de las clases sociales de los años treinta es tal vez el más "americano" de todos los clásicos norteamericanos.
More editions of Las Uvas De LA Ira:
Results page: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101-109 NEXT
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}