books tagged “20th c” (20th C / 20th c.)

books tagged “20th c”

›
› Find signed collectible books by ''

English

  • The Age of Innocence
    by Edith Wharton, Regina Barreca
    ISBN 0451526120 (0-451-52612-0)
    Softcover, Signet

    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]

    More editions of The Age of Innocence:

  • The American
    by Henry James, Edel, Leon (AFT), Lee Clark Mitchell
    ISBN 0451529669 (0-451-52966-9)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The American'
    Book summary:

    In this classic collision of the New World with Old Europe, James weaves a fable of thwarted desire that shifts between comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama.

    [via]

    More editions of The American:

  • An American Tragedy
    by Theodore Dreiser
    ISBN 0451527704 (0-451-52770-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'An American Tragedy'
    Book summary:

    Theodore Dreiser set out to create an epic character and, in the form of Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy, he succeeded. Griffiths is just a Midwest kid, the son of a preacher in Kansas City, who tastes a little sophistication and then hits the road seeking pleasure and success. He has his moments, conducting more than one romantic affair, until that ill-advised pursuit ensnares him. Then he reads about an "accident" of a young woman and ponders a dastardly deed ... Dreiser spins these scenes with the eye of a master in control of his form. An American Tragedy stands as an American masterpiece. [via]

    More editions of An American Tragedy:

  • Animal Farm
    by George Orwell
    ISBN 0451525361 (0-451-52536-1)
    Softcover, Signet

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Animal Farm'
    Book summary:

    Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. --Joyce Thompson [via]

    More editions of Animal Farm:

  • Anne of Green Gables
    by L.M. Montgomery
    ISBN 0451528824 (0-451-52882-4)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Anne of Green Gables'
    Book summary:

    Everyone's favorite redhead, the spunky Anne Shirley, begins her adventures at Green Gables, a farm outside Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. When the freckled girl realizes that the elderly Cuthberts wanted to adopt a boy instead, she begins to try to win them-and, consequently, the reader-over. [via]

    More editions of Anne of Green Gables:

  • At Swim-Two-Birds
    by Flann O'Brien
    ISBN 0452259134 (0-452-25913-4)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    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:

  • Atlas Shrugged
    by Ayn Rand
    ISBN 0452011876 (0-452-01187-6)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Atlas Shrugged'
    Book summary:

    At last, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is available to her millions of loyal readers in trade paperback.

    With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, "Who is John Galt?", Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers.

    Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

    Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club [via]

    More editions of Atlas Shrugged:

  • Babbitt
    by Sinclair Lewis
    ISBN 0451527089 (0-451-52708-9)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Babbitt'
    Book summary:

    Sinclair Lewis created one of the most compelling and disturbing characters of American fiction in this portrait of a hardened, conniving, social-climbing real-estate man in his classic work "Babbit". Through detailed depictions of the protagonist's home, work, and social life, a meticulous landscape is created, representing the beliefs, aspirations, and failures of the American middle class. Introduction by Loren Baritz. [via]

    More editions of Babbitt:

  • Oates, Joyce Carol: Bellefleur
    Bellefleur
    by Joyce Carol Oates
    ISBN 0452267943 (0-452-26794-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Bellefleur'

    More editions of Bellefleur:

  • Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago
    by Mike Royko
    ISBN 0452261678 (0-452-26167-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago'
    Book summary:

    This is the story of the late Richard J. Daley, politician and self-promoter extraordinaire, from his inauspicious youth on Chicagos South Side through his rapid climb to the seat of power as mayor and boss of the Democratic Party machine. A bare-all account of Daleys cardinal sins as well as his milestone achievements, this scathing work by Chicago journalist Mike Royko brings to life the most powerful political figure of his time: his laissez-faire policy toward corruption, his unique brand of public relations, and the widespread influence that earned him the epithet of king maker. The politician, the machine, the cityRoyko reveals all with witty insight and unwavering honesty, in this incredible portrait of the last of the backroom Caesars. This new edition includes an Introduction in which the author reflects on Daleys death and the future of Chicago.
    [via]

    More editions of Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago:

  • McCarthy, Mary: A Charmed Life
    A Charmed Life
    by Mary McCarthy
    ISBN 0452250854 (0-452-25085-4)
    Softcover, Penguin USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Charmed Life'

    More editions of A Charmed Life:

  • Pope, Edith: Colcorton
    Colcorton
    by Edith Pope
    ISBN 0452263247 (0-452-26324-7)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Colcorton'

    More editions of Colcorton:

  • Country of the Pointed Firs
    by Sarah Orne Jewett
    ISBN 0451527577 (0-451-52757-7)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Country of the Pointed Firs'
    Book summary:

    In 1896, at the age of forty-seven, Sarah Orne Jewett published this classic novel of a female writer looking for seclusion and inspiration in the coastal town of Dunnet Landing, Maine. Returning to the women and men of small New England towns for the accompanying collection of short fiction, this remarkable volume weaves a colorful and moving tapestry of the grand complexities, joys, and beauties of life.

    "The young student of American Literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say 'a masterpiece.'"-- Willa Cather [via]

    More editions of Country of the Pointed Firs:

  • Fowles, John: The Ebony Tower
    The Ebony Tower
    by John Fowles
    ISBN 0452267102 (0-452-26710-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Ebony Tower'

    More editions of The Ebony Tower:

  • Falling Angels: Library Edition
    by Tracy Chevalier
    ISBN 0452283205 (0-452-28320-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Falling Angels: Library Edition'
    Book summary:

    Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well- schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia's mother, Maude's mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day, and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women's suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense.

    Although the point of view shifts between many characters (with even the Coleman's maid and cook getting their say, sometimes unnecessarily), Falling Angels is essentially the children's story, since it is their lives that are most open to change. The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII's reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) deftly uses the nation's dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find Falling Angels an unusually subtle novel, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard's End. --Regina Marler [via]

    More editions of Falling Angels: Library Edition:

  • Fear of Flying
    by Erica Jong
    ISBN 0452274796 (0-452-27479-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Fear of Flying'
    Book summary:

    Here is the gloriously wicked, sexy, brilliant novel that brought sexual frankness--and freedom--into its own--a book that still speaks to women's innermost sexual fantasies--and a book for every man who still believes that women "don't think like that". New introduction by the author. [via]

    More editions of Fear of Flying:

  • Fences
    by August Wilson
    ISBN 0452264014 (0-452-26401-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Fences'
    Book summary:

     The 1987 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

    From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilsons ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive.  Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s... a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can...a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less...

    [via]

    More editions of Fences:

  • Four Major Plays
    by Henrik Ibsen, Templeton, Joan (AFT), Rolf Fjelde
    ISBN 0451530225 (0-451-53022-5)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Four Major Plays'
    Book summary:

    Four Major Plays: Volume I
    A Doll House
    The Wild Duck
    Hedda Gabler
    The Master Builder

    Among the greatest and best known of Ibsens works, these four plays brilliantly exemplify his landmark contributions to the theater: his realistic dialogue, probing of social problems, and depiction of characters inner lives as well as their actions. Rich in symbolism and often autobiographical, each of these dramas deals convincingly and provocatively with such universal themes as greed, fear, and sexual hostility, and confronts the eternal conflict between reality and illusion. These Rolf Fjelde translations have been widely acclaimed as the definitive versions of the major works of the father of modern theater.

    Translated and with a Foreword by Rolf Fjelde
    and a New Afterword by Joan Templeton

    [via]

    More editions of Four Major Plays:

  • Drabble, Margaret: The Garrick Year
    The Garrick Year
    by Margaret Drabble
    ISBN 0452262828 (0-452-26282-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Garrick Year'

    More editions of The Garrick Year:

  • Girl With a Pearl Earring
    by Tracy Chevalier
    ISBN 0452282152 (0-452-28215-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Girl With a Pearl Earring'
    Book summary:

    With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

    Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.

    Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss:

    I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.
    In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton [via]

    More editions of Girl With a Pearl Earring:

  • Lessing, Doris May: The Grass Is Singing
    The Grass Is Singing
    by Doris May Lessing
    ISBN 0452261198 (0-452-26119-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Grass Is Singing'

    More editions of The Grass Is Singing:

  • Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0451526570 (0-451-52657-0)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer'
    Book summary:

    Featuring a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, the author's two best-known stories tell of encounters with moral depravity in the wilds of the Congo and second selves on a voyage into the Gulf of Siam. Reprint." [via]

    More editions of Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer:

  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster, Marler, Regina (AFT), Benjamin Demott
    ISBN 0451530462 (0-451-53046-2)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Howards End'
    Book summary:

    Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
    Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

    Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]

    More editions of Howards End:

  • Wood, Michael: In Search of the Trojan War
    In Search of the Trojan War
    by Michael Wood
    ISBN 0452263646 (0-452-26364-6)
    Softcover, Penguin USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'In Search of the Trojan War'
    Book summary:

    For thousands of years the tale of Troy has captivated the western imagination. Hector and Achilles, Odysseus and the beautiful Helen are among the most enduring figures in art and literature. But did Troy really exist, and did the Trojan war really take place? In this study Michael Wood takes the reader back to the Greek Age of Heroes. In the Aegean, Turkey and ancient Egypt, he follows the footsteps of the travellers and adventurers who tried to locate the lost cities of legend. The book takes a fresh look at some of the most famous and exciting discoveries in archaeology: particularly those of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete. This new edition has been revised to take account of new developments in the search for Troy, including the rediscovery of the so-called Jewels of Helen, which vanished during the fall of Berlin in 1945. The book also gives an account of the re-excavation of the site of Troy which began in 1988, and which is already yielding new evidence about the historical city which lay behind the intriguing story. [via]

    More editions of In Search of the Trojan War:

  • Island of Dr Moreau
    by H. G. Wells
    ISBN 0451529898 (0-451-52989-8)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Island of Dr Moreau'
    Book summary:

    A shipwreck in the South Seas, a palm-tree paradise where a mad doctor conducts vile experiments, animals that become human and then "beastly" in ways they never were before--it's the stuff of high adventure. It's also a parable about Darwinian theory, a social satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), and a bloody tale of horror. Or, as H. G. Wells himself wrote about this story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation." This colorful tale by the author of The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds lit a firestorm of controversy at the time of its publication in 1896. [via]

    More editions of Island of Dr Moreau:

  • Lewis, Sinclair: It Can't Happen Here: Library Edition
    It Can't Happen Here: Library Edition
    by Sinclair Lewis, Michael Meyer
    ISBN 0451529294 (0-451-52929-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'It Can't Happen Here: Library Edition'

    More editions of It Can't Happen Here: Library Edition:

  • Jacob's Room
    by Virginia Woolf
    ISBN 0451530055 (0-451-53005-5)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Jacob's Room'
    Book summary:

    With its publication in 1922, Virginia Woolf revolutionized the modern novel with Jacob's Room. Based on the life of her own brother, this unforgettable book chronicles the life and times of Jacob Flanders, from childhood to his death in World War I. An untraditional tale focusing on a flow of random impressions through the minds of its characters, Jacob's Room remains an important work in the development of the novel form-and a shining example of Woolf's genius and literary daring. [via]

    More editions of Jacob's Room:

  • Jazz
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0452269652 (0-452-26965-2)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Jazz'
    Book summary:

    Jazz embraces the vibrant music and lifestyle of 1920s Harlem, an urban renaissance of opportunity and glamour. A novel of murder, hard lives, and broken dreams, Jazz sways with a lyric medley of voices and human consciousness.

    Narrated by the author, Toni Morrison, this is an intense but gratifying three hours of tape. Background jazz music enhances the feel of '20s Harlem, a city that attracted thousands of black southerners hoping for better lives. Joe Trace and his wife Violet were part of this migration; madly in love with each other and the idea of this urban mecca, they "traindanced into the city." But like so many of the marriages in Morrison's novels, this union crumbles, and the dreams for a better life fade away. Joe finds another, a love "that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going."

    In Jazz, time ebbs and flows like human memory, traversing between recollections of the past and expectations for the future; likewise, jazz music is often wild and chaotic. Here Morrison once again exemplifies herself as both a superb writer and a masterful storyteller. [via]

    More editions of Jazz:

  • The Jungle
    by Upton Beall Sinclair
    ISBN 0451528042 (0-451-52804-2)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Jungle'
    Book summary:

    In this powerful book we enter the world of  Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives  in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom,  and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the  astonishing truth about "packingtown," the  busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where  new world visions perish in a jungle of human  suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the  "muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman's  lot at the turn of the century: the backbreaking  labor, the injustices of "wage-slavery,"  the bewildering chaos of urban life. The  Jungle , a story so shocking that it  launched a government investigation, recreates this  startling chapter if our history in unflinching  detail. Always a vigorous champion on political reform,  Sinclair is also a gripping storyteller, and his  1906 novel stands as one of the most important --  and moving -- works in the literature of social  change. [via]

    More editions of The Jungle:

  • Kim
    by Rudyard Kipling, Raymond Carney
    ISBN 0451525493 (0-451-52549-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Kim'
    Book summary:

    One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

    Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.
    From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"

    In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber [via]

    More editions of Kim:

  • Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer
    ISBN 0451528883 (0-451-52888-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'
    Book summary:

    Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters. [via]

    More editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover:

  • Lives of Girls and Women
    by Alice Munro, Del Jordan
    ISBN 0452259754 (0-452-25975-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lives of Girls and Women'
    Book summary:

    Lives of Girls and Women is nearly always recommended as an ideal introduction to Alice Munro. Everyone who preaches this doctrine knows that it is doing Munro a bit of a disservice: Lives of Girls and Women is her only novel, and it is certainly not her best work. Nonetheless, it is a seductive book, one that consistently turns dabblers into Munro devotees.

    Munro follows the late childhood and adolescence of Del Jordan, an intelligent girl growing up in Jubilee, Ontario (one of the most palpable fictional towns in all of Canadian fiction) in the 1940s. Del is ordinary enough--she doesn't fit into her community, but this is the lot of any gifted child in a small, working-class town. Her father raises silver foxes for a living, her mother (a tentative feminist living in a decidedly traditionalist community) drives the back roads trying to sell encyclopedias to farmers. Del's passage through the usual travails of growing up (family deaths, lost friends, the awkward beginnings of sexuality) is rendered with extraordinary skill. It is easy to find compassionate writers, but the Munro of Lives of Girls and Women is a much more valuable find: a writer blessed with empathy, humour, and even cruelty. She can lovingly eviscerate her characters when it is necessary, yet never slips into the lazy shorthand of caricature. Some of her short story collections are better made (Open Secrets and Who Do You Think You Are?, for example), but the scope of Lives of Girls and Women makes it one of Munro's most memorable books. --Jack Illingworth [via]

    More editions of Lives of Girls and Women:

  • Kincaid, Jamaica: Lucy
    Lucy
    by Jamaica Kincaid
    ISBN 0452266777 (0-452-26677-7)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lucy'

    More editions of Lucy:

  • Lust for Life
    by Irving Stone
    ISBN 0452262496 (0-452-26249-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lust for Life'
    Book summary:

    The book captures the atmosphere of the Paris of the Post-Impressionists and reconstructs the development of Van Gogh's art. [via]

    More editions of Lust for Life:

  • M. Butterfly
    by David Henry Hwang
    ISBN 0452272599 (0-452-27259-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'M. Butterfly'
    Book summary:

    David Henry Hwangs beautiful, heartrending play featuring an afterword by the author  winner of a 1988 Tony Award for Best Play and nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize

    Based on a true story that stunned the world, M. Butterfly opens in the cramped prison cell where diplomat Rene Gallimard is being held captive by the French governmentand by his own illusions. In the darkness of his cell he recalls a time when desire seemed to give him wings. A time when Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva, touched him with a love as vivid, as seductiveand as elusiveas a butterfly.

    How could he have known, then, that his ideal woman was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese governmentand a man disguised as a woman? In a series of flashbacks, the diplomat relives the twenty-year affair from the temptation to the seduction, from its consummation to the scandal that ultimately consumed them both. But in the end, there remains only one truth: Whether or not Gallimard's passion was a flight of fancy, it sparked the most vigorous emotions of his life.

    Only in real life could love become so unreal. And only in such a dramatic tour de force do we learn how a fantasy can become a man's mistressas well as his jailer. M. Butterfly is one of the most compelling, explosive, and slyly humorous dramas ever to light the Broadway stage, a work of unrivaled brilliance, illuminating the conflict between men and women, the differences between East and West, racial stereotypesand the shadows we cast around our most cherished illusions.

    M. Butterfly remains one of the most influential romantic plays of contemporary literature, and in 1993 was made into a film by David Cronenberg starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.

    [via]

    More editions of M. Butterfly:

  • Wilson, August: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts
    Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts
    by August Wilson
    ISBN 0452261139 (0-452-26113-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts'

    More editions of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts:

  • Marya : A Life
    by Joyce Carol Oates
    ISBN 0452280206 (0-452-28020-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Marya : A Life'
    Book summary:

    Successful author and famous intellectual Marya Knauer did not always occupy such a secure and comfortable position in life. Her memories of her childhood in Innisfail, New York are by turns romantic and traumatic. The early violent death of her father and abandonment by her mother have left her with a permanent sense of dislocation and loss. After decades apart, Marya becomes determined to find the mother who gave her away. In searching for her past, Marya changes her present life more than she could ever have imagined. Vividly evoking the natural beauty of rural upstate New York, and the complex emotions of a woman artist, Marya: A Life is one of Joyce Carol Oates's most deeply personal and fully-realized novels. [via]

    More editions of Marya : A Life:

  • The Master and Margarita
    by Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov
    ISBN 0452008999 (0-452-00899-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Master and Margarita'
    Book summary:

    Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.

    Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"

    Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary Park [via]

    More editions of The Master and Margarita:

  • The Mentor Book of Major American Poets
    by Oscar Williams
    ISBN 0451627911 (0-451-62791-1)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Mentor Book of Major American Poets'
    Book summary:

    BRAND NEW- EXCELLENT CONDITION [via]

    More editions of The Mentor Book of Major American Poets:

  • Maugham, W. Somerset: The Moon and Sixpence
    The Moon and Sixpence
    by W. Somerset Maugham, Perry Meisel
    ISBN 0451525671 (0-451-52567-1)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Moon and Sixpence'

    More editions of The Moon and Sixpence:

  • My Antonia
    by Willa Cather, Marilyn Sides
    ISBN 0451529723 (0-451-52972-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    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]

    More editions of My Antonia:

  • Oliver Twist
    by Charles Dickens, Le Comte, Edward (AFT), Frederick Busch
    ISBN 0451529715 (0-451-52971-5)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Oliver Twist'
    Book summary:

    Named a "national institution" by George Orwell, Dickens offers his most popular tale, of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London-a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. [via]

    More editions of Oliver Twist:

  • Paradise
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0452280397 (0-452-28039-7)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Paradise'
    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1998: Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim "the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.

    Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death. [via]

    More editions of Paradise:

  • The Portrait of a Lady
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0451525973 (0-451-52597-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'
    Book summary:

    Seeking the opportunities of Europe, Isabel Archer, a young American, is courted by three men, comes to rely on an invalid cousin, an falls prey to a scheming, sophisicated older woman. Reissue. [via]

    More editions of The Portrait of a Lady:

  • Ragtime
    by E.L. Doctorow
    ISBN 0452279070 (0-452-27907-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Ragtime'
    Book summary:

    An account of the interrelated lives of the families of a New Rochelle manufacturer, an immigrant socialist, and a Harlem musician and their involvements with period notables is set against the backdrop of early twentieth-century American history. Reprint. [via]

    More editions of Ragtime:

  • Lawrence, D. H.: The Rainbow
    The Rainbow
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 0451530306 (0-451-53030-6)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Rainbow'

    More editions of The Rainbow:

  • Raisin in the Sun
    by Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Nemiroff
    ISBN 0452267765 (0-452-26776-5)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Raisin in the Sun'
    Book summary:

    This edition offers Hansberry's complete uncut screen adaptation of her play, containing at least forty percent new material that does not appear in the play.
    [via]

    More editions of Raisin in the Sun:

  • Hansberry, Lorraine: A Raisin in the Sun and the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: And, the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
    A Raisin in the Sun and the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: And, the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
    by Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Nemiroff
    ISBN 0452259428 (0-452-25942-8)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Raisin in the Sun and the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: And, the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window'

    More editions of A Raisin in the Sun and the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: And, the Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window:

  • Barker, Pat: Regeneration
    Regeneration
    by Pat Barker
    ISBN 0452270073 (0-452-27007-3)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Regeneration'

    More editions of Regeneration:

  • Howells, William Dean: The Rise of Silas Lapham
    The Rise of Silas Lapham
    by William Dean Howells, Louis Auchincloss
    ISBN 0451528220 (0-451-52822-0)
    Softcover, Signet

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise of Silas Lapham'

    More editions of The Rise of Silas Lapham:

  • The Scarlet Letter
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    ISBN 0451526082 (0-451-52608-2)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Scarlet Letter'
    Book summary:

    An ardent young woman, her cowardly lover, and her vengeful husband come together in this classic novel of sin and salvation in the Puritan world of 17th-century Boston. Features an updated bibliography and an Introduction by Brenda Wineapple, a leading contemporary Hawthorn scholar. Reissue. [via]

    More editions of The Scarlet Letter:

  • Conrad, Joseph: Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories
    Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories
    by Joseph Conrad, Abraham Lass, Tasman Norman
    ISBN 0451626672 (0-451-62667-2)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories'

    More editions of Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories:

  • The Shining
    by Stephen King
    ISBN 0452267226 (0-452-26722-6)
    Softcover, Penguin USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Shining'
    Book summary:

    Danny is only five years old, but he is a 'shiner', aglow with psychic voltage. When his father becomes caretaker of an old hotel, his visions grow out of control. Cut off by blizzards, the hotel seems to develop an evil force, and who are the mysterious guests in the supposedly empty hotel? [via]

    More editions of The Shining:

  • Sister Carrie
    by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Lingeman
    ISBN 0451527607 (0-451-52760-7)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Sister Carrie'
    Book summary:

    Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.

    Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]

    More editions of Sister Carrie:

  • Castillo, Ana: So Far from God
    So Far from God
    by Ana Castillo
    ISBN 0452272092 (0-452-27209-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'So Far from God'

    More editions of So Far from God:

  • The Song of Roland
    by Robert Harrison
    ISBN 0451528573 (0-451-52857-3)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Song of Roland'
    Book summary:

    It is a timeless story of war and vengeance, of Good versus Evil. And at the center of this heroic epic stands Roland-the supreme embodiment of chivalry and honor. [via]

    More editions of The Song of Roland:

  • Song Of Solomon
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0452260116 (0-452-26011-6)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Song Of Solomon'
    Book summary:

    The third novel from one America's most powerful writers turns 20 years old in 1997, but Song of Solomon long ago ascended to the top shelf in the ranks of great literature. This Everyman's Library hardcover edition of the Nobel Prize-winning Morrison's lyrical, powerful, and erudite novel contains a chronology that situates the book in its historical context, and an introduction from author Reynolds Price. [via]

    More editions of Song Of Solomon:

  • The Song of the Lark
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 0451525337 (0-451-52533-7)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Song of the Lark'
    Book summary:

    [This is the MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case.]

    In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist in the making, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self.

    Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her humble hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the big city, determined to be an opera diva. As she moves through a series of music teachers in Chicago, Thea finds that the attitudes and standards of those around her rarely match her own. It is only when she reconnects with pure nature in a brilliant Arizona desert canyon that Thea rediscovers the sensuous, mystical openness that is the source of her art. Realizing she must protect this experience at all costs, she resolves to shed all relationships that don't serve her higher purpose. [via]

    More editions of The Song of the Lark:

  • Sons And Lovers
    by D. H. Lawrence, Jackson, Dennis (AFT)
    ISBN 0451530004 (0-451-53000-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Sons And Lovers'
    Book summary:

    Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."

    Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."

    The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."

    The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner. --Melanie Rehak [via]

    More editions of Sons And Lovers:

  • The Story of My Life: Library Edition
    by Helen Keller
    ISBN 0451528255 (0-451-52825-5)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Story of My Life: Library Edition'
    Book summary:

    Helen Keller would not be bound by conditions. Rendered deaf and blind at 19 months by scarlet fever, she learned to read (in several languages) and even speak, eventually graduating with honors from Radcliffe College in 1904, where as a student she wrote The Story of My Life. That she accomplished all of this in an age when few women attended college and the disabled were often relegated to the background, spoken of only in hushed tones, is remarkable. But Keller's many other achievements are impressive by any standard: she authored 13 books, wrote countless articles, and devoted her life to social reform. An active and effective suffragist, pacifist, and socialist (the latter association earned her an FBI file), she lectured on behalf of disabled people everywhere. She also helped start several foundations that continue to improve the lives of the deaf and blind around the world.

    As a young girl Keller was obstinate, prone to fits of violence, and seething with rage at her inability to express herself. But at the age of 7 this wild child was transformed when, at the urging of Alexander Graham Bell, Anne Sullivan became her teacher, an event she declares "the most important day I remember in all my life." (Sullivan herself had once been blind, but partially recovered her sight after a series of operations.) In a memorable passage, Keller writes of the day "Teacher" led her to a stream and repeatedly spelled out the letters w-a-t-e-r on one of her hands while pouring water over the other. This method proved a revelation: "That living world awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away." And, indeed, most of them were.

    In her lovingly crafted and deeply perceptive autobiography, Keller's joyous spirit is most vividly expressed in her connection to nature:

    Indeed, everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom, had a part in my education.... Few know what joy it is to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze. Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a sudden terror....

    The idea of feeling rather than hearing a sound, or of admiring a flower's motion rather than its color, evokes a strong visceral sensation in the reader, giving The Story of My Life a subtle power and beauty. Keller's celebration of discovery becomes our own. In the end, this blind and deaf woman succeeds in sharpening our eyes and ears to the beauty of the world. --Shawn Carkonen [via]

    More editions of The Story of My Life: Library Edition:

  • Morrison, Toni: Sula
    Sula
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 045225227X (0-452-25227-X)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Sula'
    Book summary:

    Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." Her new novel has the same power, the same beauty. At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped. Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks--where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years ago...that there was a plague of robins when she first returned... In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and [via]

    More editions of Sula:

  • Theory of the Leisure Class
    by Thorstein Veblen
    ISBN 0451627415 (0-451-62741-5)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Theory of the Leisure Class'
    Book summary:

    The Theory of the Leisure Class is a work by Thorstein Veblen now brought to you in this new edition of the timeless classic. [via]

    More editions of Theory of the Leisure Class:

  • Stein, Gertrude: Three Lives
    Three Lives
    by Gertrude Stein
    ISBN 0452010063 (0-452-01006-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Three Lives'

    More editions of Three Lives:

  • Cather, Willa: The Troll Garden
    The Troll Garden
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 0452007143 (0-452-00714-3)
    Softcover, Penguin USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Troll Garden'

    More editions of The Troll Garden:

  • Turn of the Screw
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0451526066 (0-451-52606-6)
    Softcover, Signet Classic

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Turn of the Screw'
    Book summary:

    The story starts conventionally enough with friends sharing ghost stories 'round the fire on Christmas Eve. One of the guests tells about a governess at a country house plagued by supernatural visitors. But in the hands of Henry James, the master of nuance, this little tale of terror is an exquisite gem of sexual and psychological ambiguity. Only the young governess can see the ghosts; only she suspects that the previous governess and her lover are controlling the two orphaned children (a girl and a boy) for some evil purpose. The household staff don't know what she's talking about, the children are evasive when questioned, and the master of the house (the children's uncle) is absent. Why does the young girl claim not to see a perfectly visible woman standing on the far side of the lake? Are the children being deceptive, or is the governess being paranoid? By leaving the questions unanswered, The Turn of Screw generates spine-tingling anxiety in its mesmerized readers. [via]

    More editions of Turn of the Screw:

  • Twenty Years at Hull-House
    by Jane Addams
    ISBN 0451527399 (0-451-52739-9)
    Softcover, Signet

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Twenty Years at Hull-House'
    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:

  • Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano
    Under the Volcano
    by Malcolm Lowry
    ISBN 0452255953 (0-452-25595-3)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Under the Volcano'

    More editions of Under the Volcano:

  • Oates, Joyce Carol: We Were the Mulvaneys
    We Were the Mulvaneys
    by Joyce Carol Oates
    ISBN 0452282829 (0-452-28282-9)
    Softcover, Plume

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'We Were the Mulvaneys'

    More editions of We Were the Mulvaneys:

  • A Wild Sheep Chase
    by Haruki Murakami, Alfred T. Birnbaum
    ISBN 0452265169 (0-452-26516-9)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Wild Sheep Chase'
    Book summary:

    Murakami has crafted a taut and suspenseful novel that is equal parts detective story, fantasy, and Kafkaesque allegory. In a Japan of the imagination, an advertising executive is sent on a harrowing journey in pursuit of a mythical sheep reported to embody an irresistible will to absolute power. [via]

    More editions of A Wild Sheep Chase:

  • The Wind in the Willows
    by Kenneth Grahame, Alex Taso, Luanne Rice
    ISBN 0451530144 (0-451-53014-4)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Wind in the Willows'
    Book summary:

    "[Mole] thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again." Such is the cautious, agreeable Mole's first introduction to the river and the Life Adventurous. Emerging from his home at Mole End one spring, his whole world changes when he hooks up with the good-natured, boat-loving Water Rat, the boastful Toad of Toad Hall, the society- hating Badger who lives in the frightening Wild Wood, and countless other mostly well-meaning creatures. Michael Hague's exquisitely detailed, breathtaking color illustrations on almost every generous spread--along with Kenneth Grahame's elegant, delightfully old-fashioned characterizations of the animals--make this book a wonderful read-aloud. Grahame's The Wind in the Willows has enchanted readers for four generations, and this lavishly illustrated gift edition is perhaps the finest around. (All ages, or 9 to 12) [via]

    More editions of The Wind in the Willows:

  • James, Henry: The Wings of the Dove
    The Wings of the Dove
    by Henry James, Brenda Wineapple
    ISBN 0451527283 (0-451-52728-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Wings of the Dove'

    More editions of The Wings of the Dove:

  • Zombie
    by Joyce Carol Oates
    ISBN 0452275008 (0-452-27500-8)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Zombie'
    Book summary:

    A hero who gets into the mind of a serial killer is a fixture of television crime shows, but such stories are usually disappointing, because the viewer knows it's just a gimmick. Not so with this unusual little novel, which The New York Times called a "note-perfect, horror-comic ventriloquization of a half-bright, infantile serial killer." Joyce Carol Oates has so convincingly written through the voice of a killer, you will feel nervous while reading at how familiar, how human, he is. Part of how she achieves the effect is through sparing use of bizarre capitalization (e.g., "MOON" and "FRAGMENT") and crude drawings done with a felt-tip pen. But the language is what makes it come alive, as in such weird statements as "My whole body is a numb tongue." This book was winner of the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. [via]

    More editions of Zombie:

Spanish