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books tagged “20th century america” (20th Century America / 20th century America)
books tagged “20th century america”
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Absalom, Absalom!by William FaulknerISBN 0394747755 (0-394-74775-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Absalom, Absalom!'Book summary:Read, read, read. Read everythingtrash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! Youll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, youll find out. If its not, throw it out the window. William Faulkner
[via]
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkners epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him. -
All the Pretty Horsesby Cormac McCarthyISBN 0394574745 (0-394-57474-5)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All the Pretty Horses'Book summary:Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age. [via]
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American Violence; A Documentary History,by Richard HofstadterISBN 0394716868 (0-394-71686-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-Cityby Tamara K. HarevenISBN 0394738551 (0-394-73855-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Angelsby Denis JohnsonISBN 0394759877 (0-394-75987-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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As I Lay Dyingby William Faulkner, Noel PolkISBN 0394747453 (0-394-74745-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'As I Lay Dying'Book summary:Faulkner's distinctive narrative structures--the uses of multiple points of view and the inner psychological voices of the characters--in one of its most successful incarnations here in As I Lay Dying. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members on the macabre pilgrimage, while Faulkner heaps upon them various flavors of disaster. Contains the famous chapter completing the equation about mothers and fish--you'll see. [via]
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The Beautiful Room Is Empty/91124by Edmund WhiteISBN 0394564448 (0-394-56444-8)
Hardcover, Daedalus Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty/91124'Book summary:When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.
"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World
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Belovedby Toni MorrisonISBN 0394535979 (0-394-53597-9)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beloved'Book summary:Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]
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The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925by Herbert G. GutmanISBN 0394724518 (0-394-72451-8)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veteransby Wallace TerryISBN 0394530284 (0-394-53028-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Book of Danielby E. L. DoctorowISBN 0394605012 (0-394-60501-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Bright Lights, Big Cityby Jay McInerneyISBN 0394726413 (0-394-72641-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bright Lights, Big City'Book summary:The hero of this novel is sleepwalking through his job on a chic New Yorker-style magazine by day; by night he pursues pleasure in the coke-fuelled clublands of Manhattan. But pleasure is elusive and his wife, a glamorous model, has left him. By the author of "Story of My Life". [via]
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The Crossingby Cormac McCarthyISBN 0394574753 (0-394-57475-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crossing'Book summary:The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.
This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.
Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.
But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg [via]
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Dancing Bearby James CrumleyISBN 039472576X (0-394-72576-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Days Between Stationsby Steve EricksonISBN 0394746856 (0-394-74685-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Dead and the Livingby Sharon OldsISBN 0394715632 (0-394-71563-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dead and the Living'Book summary:The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets. [via]
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Empireby Gore Vidal, Edgar BoxISBN 0394561236 (0-394-56123-6)
Hardcover, Book Sales
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire'Book summary:"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." The New York Times Book Review
In this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America's Gilded Agea period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world.
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The Enormous Roomby e e cummingsISBN 039460427X (0-394-60427-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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A Fan's Notesby ExleyISBN 0394729153 (0-394-72915-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnamby Frances FitzgeraldISBN 0394719271 (0-394-71927-1)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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Go Down, Mosesby William FaulknerISBN 0394718844 (0-394-71884-4)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Go Down, Moses'Book summary:I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize
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Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkners mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.More editions of Go Down, Moses:
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The Gold Cellby Sharon OldsISBN 0394747704 (0-394-74770-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gold Cell'Book summary:A new collection by the much praised poet whose second book THE DEAD AND THE LIVING, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. [via]
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The Great Divide : Second Thoughts on the American Dreamby Studs TerkelISBN 0394570537 (0-394-57053-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Divide : Second Thoughts on the American Dream'Book summary:Signed by the author. [via]
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Great Jones Streetby Don DelilloISBN 039471718X (0-394-71718-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Grendelby John Champlin GardnerISBN 0394740564 (0-394-74056-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Hard Timesby Studs TerkelISBN 0394746910 (0-394-74691-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hard Times'Book summary:First published in 1970, this classic of oral history features the voices of men and women who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. It includes accounts by congressmen C. Wright Patman and Hamilton Fish, as well as failed presidential candidate Alf M. Landon, who recalls what it was like to be governor of Kansas in 1933:
Men with tears in their eyes begged for an appointment that would help save their homes and farms. I couldn't see them all in my office. But I never let one of them leave without my coming out and shakin' hands with 'em. I listened to all their stories, each one of 'em. But it was obvious I couldn't take care of all their terrible needs.
The book includes also the perspectives of ordinary men and women, such as Jim Sheridan, who took part in the 1932 march by World War I veterans to petition for their benefits in Washington, D.C., where they were repelled by army troops led by General Douglas MacArthur. Or Edward Santander, who was a child then: "My first memories come about '31. It was simply a gut issue then: eating or not eating, living or not living." Studs Terkel makes history come alive, drawing out experiences and emotions from his interviewees to the degree few have ever been able to match. [via]More editions of Hard Times:
Huey Longby T. Harry WilliamsISBN 0394747909 (0-394-74790-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur - The Generation That Changed America's Role in the Worldby David FromkinISBN 0394589017 (0-394-58901-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Invisible Manby Ralph EllisonISBN 0394525493 (0-394-52549-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invisible Man'Book summary:We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak [via]
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Jrby William GaddisISBN 0394731425 (0-394-73142-5)
Hardcover
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jr'Book summary:A signed 1st edition of the author's scarce second novel. [via]
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Knight's Gambitby William FaulknerISBN 0394727290 (0-394-72729-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Knight's Gambit'Book summary:Gavin Stevens, the wise student of crime and folkways of Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha county, plays the major role in these six stories of violence. [via]
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Lincoln : A Novelby Gore VidalISBN 0394528956 (0-394-52895-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lincoln : A Novel'Book summary:Lincoln is a masterwork of historical fiction, in which Gore Vidal combines a comprehensive knowledge of Civil War America with 20th-century literary technique, probing the minds and motives of the men surrounding Abraham Lincoln, including personal secretary John Hay and scheming cabinet members William Seward and Salmon P. Chase, as well as his wife, Mary Todd. It is a book monumental in scope that never loses sight of the intimate and personal in its depiction of the power struggles that accompanied Lincoln's efforts to preserve the Union at all costs--efforts in which the eradication of slavery was far from the president's main objective. As usual, there's plenty of room for Vidal's wickedly humorous deflation of American icons, including a comic interlude in a Washington bordello in which Lincoln's former law partner informs Hay that Lincoln had contracted syphilis as a young man and had, just before marrying Mary Todd, suffered what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. (Protestors should note that Vidal is only passing along what that former partner had written in his own biography of Lincoln.) Don't be intimidated by the size of Lincoln; if you like historical fiction, you should read this book at the first opportunity. --Ron Hogan [via]
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Lucy Gayheartby Willa CatherISBN 0394717562 (0-394-71756-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Main Currents in Modern American Historyby Gabriel KolkoISBN 0394725123 (0-394-72512-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Mansionby William FaulknerISBN 0394702824 (0-394-70282-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mansion'Book summary:This completes the great trilogy of the Snopes family in Yoknapatawpha and traces the downfall of this indomitable post-bellum family. [via]
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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnsonby Robert A. CaroISBN 0394720954 (0-394-72095-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson'Book summary:Robert Caro's Master of the Senate examines in meticulous detail Lyndon Johnson's career in that body, from his arrival in 1950 (after 12 years in the House of Representatives) until his election as JFK's vice president in 1960. This, the third of a projected four-volume series, studies not only the pragmatic, ruthless, ambitious Johnson, who wielded influence with both consummate skill and "raw, elemental brutality," but also the Senate itself, which Caro describes (pre-1957) as a "cruel joke" and an "impregnable stronghold" against social change. The milestone of Johnson's Senate years was the 1957 Civil Rights Act, whose passage he single-handedly engineered. As important as the bill was--both in and of itself and as a precursor to wider-reaching civil rights legislation--it was only close to Johnson's Southern "anti-civil rights" heart as a means to his dream: the presidency. Caro writes that not only does power corrupt, it "reveals," and that's exactly what this massive, scrupulously researched book does. A model of social, psychological, and political insight, it is not just masterful; it is a masterpiece. --H. O'Billovich [via]
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Maus a Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds Historyby Art SpiegelmanISBN 0394747232 (0-394-74723-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maus a Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History'Book summary:Some historical events simply beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these. Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical perspective as well as an artistic one.
Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.
This is neither easy nor pleasant. However, Vladek Spiegelman and his wife Anna are resourceful heroes, and enough acts of kindness and decency appear in the tale to spur the reader onward (we also know that the protagonists survive, else reading would be too painful). This first volume introduces Vladek as a happy young man on the make in pre-war Poland. With outside events growing ever more ominous, we watch his marriage to Anna, his enlistment in the Polish army after the outbreak of hostilities, his and Anna's life in the ghetto, and then their flight into hiding as the Final Solution is put into effect. The ending is stark and terrible, but the worst is yet to come--in the second volume of this Pulitzer Prize-winning set. --Michael Gerber [via]
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The Mind-Body Problemby Rebecca GoldsteinISBN 0394524748 (0-394-52474-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mind-Body Problem'Book summary:Wonderful book from perhaps the greatest living author today. Volume One of his "Border Trilogy." Hardcover. Original jacket. Stated First Edition. Light bumping. PO writing on front end page. Jacket price intact. Looks great. Very Good/Near Fine condition. [via]
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The Music Schoolby John UpdikeISBN 0394745108 (0-394-74510-8)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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Naked Lunchby William S. BurroughsISBN 0394538838 (0-394-53883-8)
Hardcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Naked Lunch'Book summary:"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamiya notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroine addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. [via]
The Namesby Don DelilloISBN 0394715640 (0-394-71564-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Names'Book summary:Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.
"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times
"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement
"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times [via]-
Nobody's Foolby Richard RussoISBN 0394577787 (0-394-57778-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nobody's Fool'Book summary:In his slyly funny and moving new novel, the author of The Risk Pool follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town--and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Jessica Tandy. Author reading tour.
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Of Mice and Menby John SteinbeckISBN 0394604725 (0-394-60472-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Of Mice and Men'Book summary:A parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss, OF MICE AND MEN is a powerful and moving portrayal of two men striving to understand their own unique place in the world. Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and feelings of jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes, friendship and a shared vision, and giving a voice to America's lonely and dispossessed, OF MICE AND MEN remains Steinbeck's most popular work. [via]
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One of Oursby Willa CatherISBN 0394712528 (0-394-71252-8)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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Playersby Don DelilloISBN 0394723821 (0-394-72382-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New Yorkby Robert A. CaroISBN 0394720245 (0-394-72024-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York'Book summary:The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York [Paperback] [via]
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The Professor's Houseby Willa CatherISBN 0394719131 (0-394-71913-1)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor's House'Book summary:A study in emotional dislocation and renewal--Professor Godfrey St. Peter, a man in his 50's, has achieved what would seem to be remarkable success. When called on to move to a more comfortable home, something in him rebels. [via]
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Ratner's Starby Don DelilloISBN 0394744950 (0-394-74495-0)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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The Risk Poolby Richard RussoISBN 0394565274 (0-394-56527-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Risk Pool'Book summary:A wonderfully funn and perceptive novel in the traditions of Thornton Wilder and Anne Tyler, The Risk Pool is set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult.
His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of The Risk Pool:
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Rock Springsby Richard FordISBN 0394757009 (0-394-75700-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rock Springs'Book summary:In these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West--and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace. "Beautifully imagined and crafted stories, by turns heartrending and wickedly funny; and just plain wicked. Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice, and Rock Springs is the very poetry of realism."--Joyce Carol Oates [via]
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Sanctuaryby William FaulknerISBN 0394747445 (0-394-74744-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sanctuary'Book summary:First published in 1931, this classic psychological melodrama has been viewed as more of a social document in his tragic legend of the South than mere story. From Popeye, a moonshining racketeer with no conscience and Temple Drake, beautiful, bored and vulnerable, to Harace Benbow, a lawyer of honor and decency wishing for more in his life, and Gowan Stevens, college student with a weakness for drink, Faulkner writes of changing social values and order. A sinister cast peppered with social outcasts and perverts perform abduction, murder, and mayhem in this harsh and brutal story of sensational and motiveless evil. Students of Faulkner have found an allegorical interpretation of "Sanctuary" as a comment on the degradation of old South's social order by progressive modernism and materialistic exploitation. Popeye and his co-horts represent this hurling change that is corrupting the historic traditions of the South, symbolized by Horace Stevens, which are no longer able to protect the victimized Negro and poor white trash due to middle-class apathy and inbred violence. [via]
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Six Plays by Lillian Hellmanby Lillian HellmanISBN 0394741129 (0-394-74112-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Sons and Loversby D. H. Lawrence, Alfred KazinISBN 0394604520 (0-394-60452-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› 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]
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The Sound and the Furyby William FaulknerISBN 0394747747 (0-394-74774-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sound and the Fury'Book summary:The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.
If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.
Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:
And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]More editions of The Sound and the Fury:
The Sportswriterby Richard FordISBN 0394743253 (0-394-74325-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Stories of John Cheeverby John CheeverISBN 0394747992 (0-394-74799-2)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stories of John Cheever'Book summary:Think of John Cheever's fiction, and a whole world springs to mind--a world of leafy suburbs, summer houses, commuter trains, boarding schools, and inevitably, his own chosen territory, the cocktail hour among WASPs. But it's a mistake to approach Cheever as if he were merely some sort of anthropologist documenting the customs of an obscure and vanishing tribe. Nostalgia and class issues aside, his true subject is the darkness hidden beneath the surface of postwar American life. A case in point is his famous story "The Swimmer," in which an ebullient Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the backyard pools of his neighbors. In the course of his journey, however, summer gives way to autumn, his neighbors turn against him, there are troubling intimations of disgrace and financial ruin, and he arrives to find his house both locked and empty.
Though these stories deal with bright, prosperous, ostensibly happy people, a cold wind blows through them. Age, illness, financial embarrassment, sex, alcohol, death--all of these threaten his suburban Eden. (Is it himself Cheever is mocking in his ironic "The Worm in the Apple"? "Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?") Inanimate objects carry the residue of their past owners' unhappiness and cruelty ("Seaside Houses," "The Lowboy"); expatriates long for but cannot quite find their way home ("The Woman Without A Country," "Boy in Rome"); children vanish or turn out badly (too many stories to count).
All of this is conveyed in prose both graceful and tender. No one is better than Cheever at describing a character's appearance: "He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream." Given his uncanny eye (and ear) for realistic description, it's easy to forget how experimental Cheever could be. His later stories pioneered authorial intrusions in the best postmodern style, and from the beginning, he wrote what would much later be called magical realism. (Think of the sinister broadcasts in "The Enormous Radio," or the phantom love interest in "The Chimera.") A literary event at its publication and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever remains a stunning and enormously influential book. --Mary Park [via]
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokovby Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0394586158 (0-394-58615-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Theodore Rexby Edmund MorrisISBN 0394555090 (0-394-55509-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Theodore Rex'Book summary:In this lively biography, Edmund Morris returns to the gifted, energetic, and thoroughly controversial man whom the novelist Henry James called "King Theodore." In his two terms as president of the United States, Roosevelt forged an American empire, and he behaved as if it was his destiny. In this sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris charts Roosevelt's accomplishments: the acquisition of the Panama Canal and the Philippines, the creation of national parks and monuments, and more. "Collaring Capital and Labor in either hand," Morris writes, Roosevelt made few friends, but he usually got what he wanted--and earned an enduring place in history.
Morris combines a fine command of the era's big issues with an appreciation for the daily minutiae involved in governing a nation. Less controversially inventive, but no less readable, than the Ronald Reagan biography Dutch, Theodore Rex gives readers new reason both to admire and fault an American phenomenon. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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Three by Ira Levinby Ira LevinISBN 0394545125 (0-394-54512-5)
Hardcover, Random House
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Three Livesby Gertrude SteinISBN 0394701534 (0-394-70153-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Lives'Book summary:Consists of three character studies of women; "The Good Anna"--a kind but domineering German servingwoman; "Melanctha"--an uneducated but sensitive black girl; "The Gentle Lena"--a pathetically feebleminded young German maid. [via]
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Tropic of Cancerby Henry Miller, Anais NinISBN 0394604350 (0-394-60435-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tropic of Cancer'Book summary:No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. [via]
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Tropic of Capricornby Henry MillerISBN 0394623797 (0-394-62379-7)
Softcover, Grove Press
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Wild Palmsby William FaulknerISBN 039470262X (0-394-70262-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wild Palms'Book summary:Harry Wilbourne and his lover Charlotte escape from the snare of Chicago and the security that the city holds after he has performed an abortion on her. But the shades of the prison house, of death, seem to close around them as they turn their backs on life to conserve their love. [via]
Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodiaby Arnold R. IsaacsISBN 0394725956 (0-394-72595-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Woman Hollering Creek and Other Storiesby Sandra CisnerosISBN 0394576543 (0-394-57654-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories'Book summary:These stories, breathtaking in their precision and filled with unending moments of infinite and intimate wisdom, depict the variety of life around the Mexican border while bringing us to an awareness of the commonality of our fears, desires and dreams. From the award-winning author of The House on Mango Street. [via]
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The Woman Warriorby Maxine Hong KingstonISBN 0394723929 (0-394-72392-9)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Woman Warrior'Book summary:'A brilliant memoir ...it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it ...Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior's voice, and as eloquent as any artist's' Jane Kramer, New York Times Book Review 'This is a delightful book ...tells more than I ever imagined about the strangeness of being Chinese and a woman; it also gives a superb account of what it's like simply to be alive' Victoria Radin, New Society 'A strange, enchanting book ...As a manual of self-discovery through the channels and terrors of one's own rejected communal memory, it is unbeatable' Clancy Sigal, Guardian 'As a dream -- of the "female avenger" -- it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword ...reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God' John Leonard, New York Times 'A book of fierce clarity and originality' Newsweek [via]
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Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Doby Studs TerkelISBN 0394729536 (0-394-72953-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The WPA Guide to New York Cityby Federal Writers' Project Staff, William H. WhyteISBN 0394712153 (0-394-71215-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The WPA Guide to New York City'Book summary:This tour guide for time travelers offers New York-lovers and thirties buffs an endlessly fascinating look at life as it was lived in the days when a trolley ride cost five cents, a room at the Plaza hotel was $7.50, Dodger fans flocked to Ebbetts Field, and the new World's Fair was the talk of the town. The New York of 1939 was a city where adventures began "under the clock" at the Biltmore, and the big liners sailed at midnight. The Yankees were on their way to four in a row, and Times Square was truly the crossroads of the world. [via]
The WPA Guide to Florida: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s Floridaby Federal Writers' ProjectISBN 0394722930 (0-394-72293-0)
Softcover, Pantheon Books
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The WPA Guide to Illiniosby Federal Writers' Project StaffISBN 0394721950 (0-394-72195-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Wrong Caseby James CrumleyISBN 0394735587 (0-394-73558-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Years of Lyndon Johnsonby Robert A. CaroISBN 039471654X (0-394-71654-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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