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books tagged “20th century”
books tagged “20th century”
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Babylon Revisited and Other Storiesby F. Scott FitzgeraldISBN 0684824485 (0-684-82448-5)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Babylon Revisited and Other Stories'Book summary:Written between 1920 and 1937, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers. [via]
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The BFGby Roald Dahl, Quentin BlakeISBN 0679428135 (0-679-42813-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The BFG'Book summary:Evidently not even Roald Dahl could resist the acronym craze of the early eighties. BFG? Bellowing ferret-faced golfer? Backstabbing fairy godmother? Oh, oh ... Big Friendly Giant! This BFG doesn't seem all that F at first as he creeps down a London street, snatches little Sophie out of her bed, and bounds away with her to giant land. And he's not really all that B when compared with his evil, carnivorous brethren, who bully him for being such an oddball runt. After all, he eats only disgusting snozzcumbers, and while the other Gs are snacking on little boys and girls, he's blowing happy dreams in through their windows. What kind of way is that for a G to behave?
The BFG is one of Dahl's most lovable character creations. Whether galloping off with Sophie nestled into the soft skin of his ear to capture dreams as though they were exotic butterflies; speaking his delightful, jumbled, squib-fangled patois; or whizzpopping for the Queen, he leaves an indelible impression of bigheartedness. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]
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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Lifeby Anne LamottISBN 0679435204 (0-679-43520-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life'Book summary:Think you've got a book inside of you? Anne Lamott isn't afraid to help you let it out. She'll help you find your passion and your voice, beginning from the first really crummy draft to the peculiar letdown of publication. Readers will be reminded of the energizing books of writer Natalie Goldberg and will be seduced by Lamott's witty take on the reality of a writer's life, which has little to do with literary parties and a lot to do with jealousy, writer's block and going for broke with each paragraph. Marvelously wise and best of all, great reading. [via]
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The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perceptionby Michel FoucaultISBN 0679753346 (0-679-75334-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception'Book summary:In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.
In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes -- in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death. [via]More editions of The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception:
The Cement Gardenby Ian McEwanISBN 0679750185 (0-679-75018-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Changing Light at Sandoverby James Ingram MerrillISBN 0689112823 (0-689-11282-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Changing Light at Sandover : A Poemby James MerrillISBN 0679747362 (0-679-74736-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Changing Light at Sandover: Including the Whole of the Book of Ephraim, Mirabell's Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant, and a New Coda, The Higher Keysby James MerrillISBN 0689112831 (0-689-11283-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Club Dumasby Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Sonia SotoISBN 0679777547 (0-679-77754-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Club Dumas'Book summary:Fallen angels, satanic manuals, and a passion for the works of Raphael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas among others--this is the stuff of Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte's engrossing novel The Club Dumas. Set in a world of antiquarian booksellers where dealers would gladly betray their own mothers to get their hands on a rare volume, The Club Dumas is a thinking person's thriller: in addition to a riveting plot, the book is full of intriguing details that range from the working habits of Alexandre Dumas to how one might go about forging a 17th-century text. Woven through these meditations is enough murder, sex, and the occult to keep both the hero, Lucas Corso, and the reader hopping.
As in his previous novel, The Flanders Panel, set in the world of art restoration, Mr. Pérez-Reverte has written a literary thriller to tease both the intellect and adrenaline gland. Lucas Corso makes a complex, ultimately sympathetic hero, and there's plenty to delight in the intricate twists and turns the story takes before the mystery of The Club Dumas is finally solved. [via]
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The Counterlifeby Philip RothISBN 0679749047 (0-679-74904-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Counterlife'Book summary:The saga of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman continues, 13 years after novelist Nathan Zuckerman first appeared in Roth's 1974 effort, My Life as a Man. In The Counterlife, the dentist Henry suffers an unsettling--and for Roth, a predictable--side effect to his heart medication: impotence, which leads him to undergo an ill-fated operation. The multi-layered plot line travels from New York to London to Israel, while the characters undergo a series of surprising transformations. In the words of Nathan, a change in one's life causes "a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth." It's vintage Roth. [via]
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Crystal Caveby Mary StewartISBN 0688013988 (0-688-01398-8)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crystal Cave'Book summary:Initially published nearly thirty years ago, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave has been spellbinding readers and converting them into serious Arthurian buffs ever since. The first in a series of four books, this novel focuses on the early life of Merlin the magician, and the political developments of fifth-century Britain. Not for the fainthearted, this verbose text pays careful attention to historical details and methodical plot development.
Merlin's childhood is formed by the absence of his reticent, convent-bound mother and his unnamed and unknown father. As the bastard grandson of a local king, Merlin is the object of both envy and ridicule. His strange powers and predictions earn him greater status as a pariah, and he leaves home as a preadolescent. Returning years later as a young man--empowered by self-knowledge and magic--Merlin finds himself caught in the currents of the shifting kingdoms.
As an established classic in this genre, and the first in a popular series, The Crystal Cave introduces this familiar character with fresh sensitivity. While readers looking for the romance of First Knight will be disappointed, those happy with tight writing and a complex story line will be satisfied. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien [via]
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Death in the Afternoonby Ernest HemingwayISBN 0684801450 (0-684-80145-0)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death in the Afternoon'Book summary:Still considered one of the best books ever written about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon is an impassioned look at the sport by one of its true aficionados. It reflects Hemingway's conviction that bullfighting was more than mere sport and reveals a rich source of inspiration for his art. The unrivaled drama of bullfighting, with its rigorous combination of athleticism and artistry, and its requisite display of grace under pressure, ignited Hemingway's imagination. Here he describes and explains the technical aspects of this dangerous ritual and "the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped on a stick." Seen through his eyes, bullfighting becomes a richly choreographed ballet, with performers who range from awkward amateurs to masters of great elegance and cunning.
A fascinating look at the history and grandeur of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon is also a deeper contemplation of the nature of cowardice and bravery, sport and tragedy, and is enlivened throughout by Hemingway's sharp commentary on life and literature. [via]
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- Death in the Afternoon: ISBN 068485922X (0-684-85922-X)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - Death in the Afternoon: ISBN 0684157500 (0-684-15750-0)
Hardcover, Macmillan Pub Co - Death in the Afternoon: ISBN 0684717964 (0-684-71796-4)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - Death in the Afternoon: ISBN 0684801450 (0-684-80145-0)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
- Death in the Afternoon: ISBN 068485922X (0-684-85922-X)
The Decay of the Angelby Yukio Mishima, Edward SeidenstickerISBN 0679722432 (0-679-72243-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Defense: A Novelby Michael Scammell, Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokvovISBN 0679727221 (0-679-72722-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Defense: A Novel'Book summary:Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault. [via]
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Eminent Victoriansby Lytton StracheyISBN 0679640126 (0-679-64012-6)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eminent Victorians'Book summary:The four biographical essays that make up Eminent Victorians created something of a stir when they were first published in the spring of 1918, bringing their author instant fame. In his flamboyant collection, Lytton Strachey chose to stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" Instead he provided impressionistic but acute (and, some said, skewed) portraits. Rarely does Strachey explore the details of a subject's daily or family life unless they point directly to an issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic and often scathingly funny biographical style.
None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed to revamp the very private British public school system, fares little better: in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero General Gordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability."
As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz [via]
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The Executioner's Songby Norman MailerISBN 0679424717 (0-679-42471-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Exile and the Kingdomby Albert Camus, Justin O'BrienISBN 067973385X (0-679-73385-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Eyeby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 067972723X (0-679-72723-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Eye'Book summary:Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife. [via]
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Fantomasby Marcel AllainISBN 0688043607 (0-688-04360-7)
Hardcover, William Morrow & Co
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Fire in the Lake : The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnamby Frances FitzGeraldISBN 0679723943 (0-679-72394-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fire in the Lake : The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam'Book summary:This is the prize winning work of the tragic collision between two cultures - the Vietnamese and the American. [via]
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First Love, Last Rites/Storiesby Ian McEwanISBN 0679750193 (0-679-75019-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'First Love, Last Rites/Stories'Book summary:Ian McEwan's Somerset Maugham Award-winning collection First Love, Last Rites brought him instant recognition as one of the most influential voices writing in England today. Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness. These tales are as horrifying as anything written by Clive Barker or Stephen King, but they are crafted with a lyricism and intensity that compel us to confront our secret kinship with the horrifying. [via]
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Friend of My Youthby Alice MunroISBN 0679729577 (0-679-72957-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Game of Kingsby Dorothy DunnettISBN 0679777431 (0-679-77743-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Game of Kings'Book summary:Praised for her historical fiction by critics and devoted fans alike, author Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles took the romance world by storm some 30 years ago, firmly fixing Dunnett's reputation as a master of the historical romance. The Game of Kings, the first story in The Lymond Chronicles, sets the stage for what will be a sweeping saga filled with passion, courage, and the endless fight for freedom. The setting is 1547, in Edinborough, Scotland. Francis Crawford of Lymond returns to the country despite the charge of treason hanging over his head. Set on redeeming his reputation, He leads a company of outlaws against England as he fights for the country he loves so dearly. Dangerous, quick-witted, and utterly irresistible, Lymond is pure pleasure to watch as he traverses 16th-century Scotland in search of freedom. The Game of Kings is a must-have for the historical romance connoisseur. [via]
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The Ghost Writerby Philip RothISBN 0679748989 (0-679-74898-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ghost Writer'Book summary:A middle-aged writer recalls his younger self. At 23, Nathan Zuckerman has had four stories published and a small, flattering Saturday Review up-and-coming-author profile (complete with a photo of him playing with his ex-girlfriend's cat), which he purports to scorn. As genuine and polite as he seems, Zuckerman has already hurt his family with his autobiographical art and ruined his relationship with adultery and honesty. Visiting his reclusive idol (famed for his "blend of sympathy and pitilessness") in the Berkshires, the writer watches himself watching himself and attempts to confront his work and life. Instead he finds himself turning reality into metafiction. A quote he happens upon from Henry James only complicates matters further: "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Events, however, have their revenge, weaving more out of control than even he can anticipate or ask for. Philip Roth is the master of the uncomfortable, and his alter ego a connoisseur of self-involvement, self-loathing, and self-examination. ("Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E. I. Lonoff's study and see how you feel when it's over.") [via]
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The Giftby Vladimir Nabokov, Michael ScammelISBN 0679727256 (0-679-72725-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gift'Book summary:For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. It's a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. This hyphenated creation has more than a few things in common with the author, despite Nabokov's vehement denial in the novel's foreword. Still, only a nitwit would read The Gift for its autobiographical revelations. What this early masterpiece does offer is a wealth of lyrical, witty, heartbreaking prose, beautifully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell (with an assist from Nabokov himself). Who else would note the way a street rises "at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel"? Who else has ever administered the satirical shiv to his characters with such deadly, almost affectionate aplomb?
Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes--which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.
Of course, only a fraction of The Gift is taken up with this sort of demolition derby. Fyodor's romance with Zina, for example, occasions the most ardent prose of Nabokov's career: "And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (Shades of Volodya and Véra? Only the deceased husband and wife, and perhaps Stacy Schiff, know for sure.)At the same time, The Gift is a brilliant, mesmerizing riff on the history of Russian literature, with elaborate bouquets tossed to Pushkin and Gogol. There's also a hilarious yet somehow tender evisceration of the do-gooding polemicist Nikolai Chernyshevski--which was suppressed, in fact, when the novel was originally serialized by a Russian émigré magazine. As should be clear by now, The Gift defies any attempt at quick-and-dirty summary. But the book plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with our stuffy notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. And as Nabokov repeatedly wraps the reader's consciousness around his little finger, he never holds back on that ultimate literary gift: pleasure. --James Marcus [via]
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Goodbye, Columbusby Philip RothISBN 0679748261 (0-679-74826-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Storiesby Philip RothISBN 0679601597 (0-679-60159-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories'Book summary:Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. [via]More editions of Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories:
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Great Divorceby C. S. LewisISBN 0684823764 (0-684-82376-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Divorce'Book summary:The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis's Divine Comedy: the narrator bears strong resemblance to Lewis (by way of Dante); his Virgil is the fantasy writer George MacDonald; and upon boarding a bus in a nondescript neighborhood, the narrator is taken to Heaven and Hell. The book's primary message is presented with almost oblique tidiness--"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'" However, the narrator's descriptions of sin and temptation will hit quite close to home for many readers. Lewis has a genius for describing the intricacies of vanity and self-deception, and this book is tremendously persistent in forcing its reader to consider the ultimate consequences of everyday pettiness. --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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Green Eggs and Hamby Dr. SeussISBN 0679891293 (0-679-89129-3)
Hardcover, Random House Children's Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Green Eggs and Ham'Book summary:Young fans of the unflappable Sam-I-am will be pleased as punch to discover the plethora of flaps to lift in this 10-page board book version of the Dr. Seuss classic. Sam-I-am does his very best to convince a more finicky Seuss character to try this rather unusual delicacy.
Would you? Could you? In a car?
To which the exasperated doubter replies:
Eat them! Eat them! Here they are.
You may like them. You will see.
You may like them in a tree!
I would not,
On every page readers will find sturdy, easy-to-lift flaps behind which reside the familiar characters and lines of the unique 1960 classic--except for the last page. Here, blank spaces lurk behind the flaps, just waiting to be filled in with peel-off pictures from the accompanying sheet of silly stickers. (Ages 3 to 7) --Emilie Coulter [via]
could not, in a tree.
Not in a car!
You let me be.
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Greenwitchby Susan CooperISBN 0689304269 (0-689-30426-9)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Greenwitch'Book summary:Simon, Jane and Barney, enlisted by their mysterious great uncle, arrive in a small coastal town to help recover a priceless golden grail stolen by the forces of evil, the Dark. They are not at first aware of the strange powers of another boy brought to help, Will Stanton -- nor of the sinister significance of the Greenwitch, an image of leaves and branches that for centuries has been cast into the sea for good luck in fishing and harvest.
Their search for the grail sets into motion a series of disturbing, sometimes dangerous events that, at their climax, bring forth a gift that, for a time at least, will keep the Dark from rising. [via]
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The Grey Kingby Susan Cooper, Michael HeslopISBN 0689500297 (0-689-50029-7)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Grey King'Book summary:A reisssue of the fourth book in THE DARK IS RISING sequence. [via]
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Gut Symmetriesby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0679777423 (0-679-77742-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gut Symmetries'Book summary:ailed in the Washington Post as "one of our most important writers in English, " Jeanette Winterson has firmly established her reputation as an extraordinarily daring and original novelist. In Gut Symmetries, lives and universes run parallel in a complex contemporary love story set in New York and Liverpool, and aboard the QE2. [via]
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The Hot Zoneby Richard PrestonISBN 0679430946 (0-679-43094-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hot Zone'Book summary:The dramatic and chilling story of an Ebola virus outbreak in a surburban Washington, D.C. laboratory, with descriptions of frightening historical epidemics of rare and lethal viruses. More hair-raising than anything Hollywood could think of, because it's all true. [via]
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Killer Angelsby Michael ShaaraISBN 0679643249 (0-679-64324-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Killer Angels'Book summary:This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. [via]
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The Knife Thrower and Other Storiesby Steven MillhauserISBN 0679781633 (0-679-78163-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Knife Thrower and Other Stories'Book summary:The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out." [via]
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Letters and Papers from Prisonby Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eberhard BethgeISBN 0684838273 (0-684-83827-3)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters and Papers from Prison'Book summary:Letters and Papers from Prison is a collection of notes and correspondence covering the period from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's arrest in 1943 to his execution by the Gestapo in 1945. The book is probably most famous, and most important, for its idea of "religionless Christianity"--an idea Bonhoeffer did not live long enough fully to develop, but whose timeliness only increases as the lines between secular and ecclesial life blur. Bonhoeffer's first mention of "religionless Christianity" came in a letter in 1944:
What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by "religious."
The pleasures of Letters and Papers from Prison, however are not all so profound. Occasionally, Bonhoeffer's letters burst into song--sometimes with actual musical notations, other times with unforgettable phrases. Looking forward to seeing his best friend, Bonhoeffer writes, "To meet again is a God." --Michael Joseph Gross [via]More editions of Letters and Papers from Prison:
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The Lottery : And Other Storiesby Shirley Jackson, Patrick McGrathISBN 0679640398 (0-679-64039-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lottery : And Other Stories'Book summary:A haunting and powerful collection of stories from one of America's finest writers, with a new Introduction by Patrick McGrath.
Eerie, unforgettable, and by turns terrifying and hilarious, Shirley Jackson's collection of stories plunges us into a unique, brilliantly etched world where the uncanny lurks in the everyday and where nothing is quite what it seems. In "The Lottery," Jackson's most famous work and one of the greatest--and scariest--stories of the twentieth century, a small town gathers for an annual ritual that culminates in a terrible event. In "The Daemon Lover," a woman waits, then searches, for the man she is to marry that day, only to find that he has disappeared as completely as if he had never existed. In "Trial by Combat," a shy woman confronts her kleptomaniac neighbor, and in "Pillar of Salt," a tourist in New York is gradually paralyzed by a city grown nightmarish. Throughout these twenty-five tales, we move through a variety of emotional landscapes full of loneliness and humor, oddity and cruelty, banality and terror, and searing psychological insight. No reader will come away unaffected.
The only collection to appear during Jackson's lifetime, The Lottery and Other Stories reveals the full breadth and power of this truly original writer. [via]More editions of The Lottery : And Other Stories:
The Makioka Sistersby Edward Seidensticker, Jun Ichiro TanizakiISBN 0679761640 (0-679-76164-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Makioka Sistersby Jun Ichiro Tanizaki, Edward SeidenstickerISBN 0679424520 (0-679-42452-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Talesby Oliver SacksISBN 0684853949 (0-684-85394-9)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales'Book summary:In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject." [via]
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Man Without Qualitiesby Robert Musil, Burton Pike, Sophie WilkinsISBN 0679767878 (0-679-76787-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Mao: The Unknown Storyby Jung Chang, Jon HallidayISBN 0679746323 (0-679-74632-3)
Softcover, Anchor Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mao: The Unknown Story'Book summary:In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today, Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao's drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the "myth" of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors' unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander.
Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea [via]
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Matisse Storiesby A. S. ByattISBN 067976223X (0-679-76223-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matisse Stories'Book summary:These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority.
"Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion."--San Francisco Chronicle
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]-
Midwivesby Chris BohjalianISBN 0679771468 (0-679-77146-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midwives'Book summary:On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated:
Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house.
In Midwives, Chris Bohjalian chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. It quickly becomes evident, however, that Sibyl is not the only one on trial--the prosecuting attorney and the state's medical community are all anxious to use this tragedy as ammunition against midwifery in general; this particular midwife, after all, an ex-hippie who still evokes the best of the flower-power generation, is something of an anachronism in 1981. Through it all, Sibyl, her husband, Rand, and their teenage daughter, Connie, attempt to keep their family intact, but the stress of the trial--and Sibyl's growing closeness to her lawyer--puts pressure on both marriage and family. Bohjalian takes readers through the intricacies of childbirth and the law, and by the end of Sibyl Danforth's trial, it's difficult to decide which was more harrowing--the tragic delivery or its legal aftermath.Narrated by a now adult Connie, Midwives moves back and forth in time, fitting vital pieces of information about what happened that night like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into its complicated plot. As Connie looks back on her mother's trial, she is still trying to understand what happened--not on the night of the disaster--but in the months and years that followed. --Margaret Prior [via]
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One for the Moneyby Janet EvanovichISBN 0684196395 (0-684-19639-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One for the Money'Book summary:Stephanie Plum is so smart, so honest, and so funny that her narrative charm could drive a documentary on termites. But this tough gal from New Jersey, an unemployed discount lingerie buyer, has a much more interesting story to tell: She has to say that her Miata has been repossessed and that she's so poor at the moment that she just drank her last bottle of beer for breakfast. She has to say that her only chance out of her present rut is her repugnant cousin Vinnie and his bail-bond business. She has to say that she blackmailed Vinnie into giving her a bail-bond recovery job worth $10,000 (for a murder suspect), even though she doesn't own a gun and has never apprehended a person in her life. And she has to say that the guy she has to get, Joe Morelli, is the same creep who charmed away her teenage virginity behind the pastry case in the Trenton bakery where she worked after school.
If that hard-luck story doesn't sound compelling enough, Stephanie's several unsuccessful attempts at pulling in Joe make a downright hilarious and suspenseful tale of murder and deceit. Along the way, several more outlandish (but unrelentingly real) characters join the story, including Benito Ramirez, a champion boxer who seems to be following Stephanie Plum wherever she goes.
Janet Evanovich shares an authentic feel for the streets of Trenton in her debut mystery (she developed her talents in a string of romance novels before creating Ms. Plum), and her tough, frank, and funny first-person narrator offers a winning mix of vulgarity and sensitivity. Evanovich is certainly among the best of the new voices to emerge in the mystery field of the 1990s. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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Out of Africaby Isak DinesenISBN 0679600213 (0-679-60021-3)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa'Book summary:In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
The Random House colophon made its debut in February 1927 on the cover of a little pamphlet called "Announcement Number One." Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the company's founders, had acquired the Modern Library from publishers Boni and Liveright two years earlier. One day, their friend the illustrator Rockwell Kent stopped by their office. Cerf later recalled, "Rockwell was sitting at my desk facing Donald, and we were talking about doing a few books on the side, when suddenly I got an inspiration and said, 'I've got the name for our publishing house. We just said we were go-ing to publish a few books on the side at random. Let's call it Random House.' Donald liked the idea, and Rockwell Kent said, 'That's a great name. I'll draw your trademark.' So, sitting at my desk, he took a piece of paper and in five minutes drew Random House, which has been our colophon ever since." Throughout the years, the mission of Random House has remained consistent: to publish books of the highest quality, at random. We are proud to continue this tradition today.
This edition is set from the first American edition of 1937 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]More editions of Out of Africa:
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Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grassby Isak DinesenISBN 0679724753 (0-679-72475-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass'Book summary:With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. [via]
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The Palm at the End of the Mindby Wallace Stevens, Holly StevensISBN 0679724451 (0-679-72445-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnsonby Robert A. CaroISBN 0679729453 (0-679-72945-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Pillars of the Earthby Ken FollettISBN 0688046592 (0-688-04659-2)
Hardcover, William Morrow & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pillars of the Earth'Book summary:Dust jacket notes: "Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known. Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time - the twelfth century; the place - feudal England; and the subject - the building of a glorious cathedral. The author has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters - into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life. The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king. At once a sensuous and endearing love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age, The Pillars of the Earth is without a doubt Ken Follett's masterpiece." [via]
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The Plumed Serpentby D. H. LawrenceISBN 0679734937 (0-679-73493-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Postman Always Rings Twiceby James M. CainISBN 0679723250 (0-679-72325-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Postman Always Rings Twice'Book summary:Penzler Pick, April 2000: It is sometimes easy to trace a literary genre to its source, and James M. Cain's first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, is the noir novel that paved the way for all the noir fiction that followed. The famous film starring Lana Turner and John Garfield is notoriously dark, but the novel is even more full of despair and devoid of hope. It is a short book--little more than a novella--but its searing characterization and depiction of tawdry greed and lust is branded into every reader's memory.
Frank Chambers, a drifter, is dropped from the back of a truck at a rundown rural diner. When he spots Cora, the owner's wife, he instantly decides to stay. The sexy young woman, married to Nick, a violent and thuggish boor, is equally attracted to the younger man and sees him as her way out of her hopeless, boring life. They begin a clandestine affair and plot to kill Nick, beginning their own journey toward destruction.
Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Jim Thompson, and the other notable noir writers never achieved Cain's spare brilliance. Virtually all of his major works have been filmed, though several Hollywood studios refused to make the films, directors refused to be involved, and actors turned down roles because of their repugnance at the lack of morality inherent in all Cain's characters. Reading him may not be fit for a Sunday school class, but once you begin you will be unable to resist continuing, like picking at a painful scab or watching a tarantula inside a glass dome. --Otto Penzler [via]
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Primary Colors : A Novel of Politicsby AnonymousISBN 0679448594 (0-679-44859-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Queen's Playby Dorothy DunnettISBN 067977744X (0-679-77744-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Queen's Play'Book summary:For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.
Second in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Queen's Play follows Frances Crawford of Lymond who has been abruptly called into the service of Mary Queen of Scots. Though she is only a little girl, the Queen is already the object of malicious intrigues that extend from her native country to the court of France. It is to France that Lymond must travel, exercising his sword hand and his agile wit while also undertaking the most unlikely of masquerades, all to make sure that his charge's royal person stays intact. [via]More editions of Queen's Play:
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Musicby Holly George-Warren, Anthony Decurtis, James Henke, Jim MillerISBN 0679737286 (0-679-73728-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Runaway Horsesby Michael Gallagher, Yukio MishimaISBN 0679722408 (0-679-72240-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Runaway Horses'Book summary:The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war--an era marked by depression, social change and political violence. [via]
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S/Zby Roland BarthesISBN 0686539443 (0-686-53944-3)
Softcover, French & European Pubns
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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Seaby Yukio Mishima, John NathanISBN 0679750150 (0-679-75015-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea'Book summary:"The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'ojectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part and react violently. [via]
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Sanctuaryby William FaulknerISBN 0679748148 (0-679-74814-8)
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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Selected Storiesby Alice MunroISBN 067976674X (0-679-76674-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Stories'Book summary:"Too many things," a creative writing instructor tells the narrator of "Differently." "Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think." What does Alice Munro want us to pay attention to in her Selected Stories? Everything, really, and so her narratives loop back on themselves, jump decades backward and forward in time, introduce characters who later drop out of the action, and generally break every rule in the short-story-writing book. In "Carried Away," for instance, a dead character makes a sudden, inexplicable appearance in what is otherwise the thoroughly naturalistic account of a librarian's disappointment with love. "The Albanian Virgin" is two stories in one: the first--the fanciful tale of Ghegs kidnapping a young Canadian woman--is told within the second, about a bookstore owner who has lost her own bearings after a divorce. There are stories that begin with their endings, and several more that end with beginnings; others are told from three or four different angles, each with varying degrees of reliability. Taken together, they form an intricate web of relationships and connections, falsehood and anecdote, a kind of fictional palimpsest laid over the faint traces of plot.
And yet Munro trusts her readers; she believes that we will pay attention to all these things and more. She aims to create the illusion that everything in her fiction has been left in, and it is this very capaciousness that sets her work apart, making possible the keen psychological insight of her stories about marriage as well as the cool violence of "Vandals" or "Fits." Hers is an unusual sort of realism, technically innovative and amenable--especially in the later work--to loose ends. (It also possesses a quick, flinty wit: "This was the first time I understood how God could become a real opponent, not just some kind of nuisance or large decoration," says the narrator of "The Progress of Love.") To call Munro the Canadian Chekhov is by now a commonplace--and yet she may have done more for the short fiction form than any writer since. These are stories that will be read, savored, and admired hundreds of years from now. --Mary Park [via]
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Selected Poemsby Osip Mandelshtam, Clarence Brown, W.S. MerwinISBN 0689105835 (0-689-10583-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Poems'Book summary:Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror.
This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process. [via]More editions of Selected Poems:
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The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilkeby Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen MitchellISBN 0679722017 (0-679-72201-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke'Book summary:Stephen Mitchell offers what are perhaps the most masterful and intimate translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry to date, infusing it with all the power, eloquence, rhythm and lightness of its original voice. Includes the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. [via]
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Selected Writings of Gertrude Steinby Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, F.W. DupeeISBN 0679724648 (0-679-72464-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein'Book summary:"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein's career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen. [via]
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Seven Japanese Talesby Junichiro Tanizaki, Howard HibbettISBN 0679761071 (0-679-76107-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Shameby Salman RushdieISBN 0679722041 (0-679-72204-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Shock of the Newby Robert HughesISBN 0679728767 (0-679-72876-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shock of the New'Book summary:A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. More than 250 color photos. [via]
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Silver on the Treeby Susan CooperISBN 0689500882 (0-689-50088-2)
Hardcover, Margaret K McElderry
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Silver on the Tree'Book summary:The Dark is rising in its last and greatest bid to control the world. And Will Stanton -- last-born
of the immortal Old Ones, dedicated to keeping the world free -- must join forces with his ageless
master Merriman and Bran, the Welsh boy whose destiny ties him to the Light. Drawn in with them are
the three Drew children, who are mortal, but have their own vital part in the story. These six fight
fear and death in the darkly brooding Welsh hills, in a quest through time and space that touches the
most ancient myths of the British Isles, and that brings Susan Cooper's masterful sequence of novels
to a satisfying close. [via]More editions of Silver on the Tree:
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The Sleepwalkersby Hermann Broch, Willa Muir, Edwin MuirISBN 0679764062 (0-679-76406-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sleepwalkers'Book summary:With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.
Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin (The Anarchist), or an opportunistic war-deserter (The Relaist), Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters' psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason. [via]More editions of The Sleepwalkers:
Some Prefer Nettlesby Junichiro TanizakiISBN 0679752692 (0-679-75269-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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A Son of the Circusby John IrvingISBN 0679434968 (0-679-43496-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Son of the Circus'Book summary:First Printing. A superb near mint condition first print copy in an unclipped and near fine dustjacket. Signed by the author John Irving-- with signature only--- on the half title page. The lightest of toning to the page edges top and bottom--only--a little dustiness--or would be "as new". Dustjacket has very very light rubbing to the front panel--or else also would be fine. A clean and tight copy without any interior markings--just a very collectable copy. From the award winning author of "Cider House Rules" and other great novels.Protected by an archival Brodart jacket covering. As always, will be shipped Priority mail at media mail pricing. [via]
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The Souls of Black Folkby W. E. B. Du BoisISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Souls of Black Folk'Book summary:William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.
With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]
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South of the Border, West of the Sunby Haruki MurakamiISBN 0679767398 (0-679-76739-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'South of the Border, West of the Sun'Book summary:In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age, with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment, becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school, but he loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college, and his 20s, before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns, weighed down with secrets:
When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.
Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the Sheep Man will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving, and honest meditation on the nature of love, distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat "King" Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami, but in his quietly dazzling way, he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake [via]More editions of South of the Border, West of the Sun:
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The Sparrow : A Novelby Mary Doria RussellISBN 0679451501 (0-679-45150-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sparrow : A Novel'Book summary:In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer. [via]
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Storiesby Katherine MansfieldISBN 0679733744 (0-679-73374-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Strange Pilgrimsby Gabriel García Márquez, Edith GrossmanISBN 0679425667 (0-679-42566-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Strange Pilgrims'Book summary:In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact.
In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of Strange Pilgrims:
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Such a Long Journeyby Rohinton MistryISBN 0679738711 (0-679-73871-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Such a Long Journey'Book summary:It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his fathers ambitions for him. He is the one reasonable voice amidst the ongoing dramas of his neighbours. One day, he receives a letter from an old friend, asking him to help in what at first seems like an heroic mission. But he soon finds himself unwittingly drawn into a dangerous network of deception. Compassionate, and rich in details of character and place, this unforgettable novel charts the journey of a moral heart in a turbulent world of change. [via]
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Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanityby Primo Levi, Stuart WoolfISBN 0684826801 (0-684-82680-1)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity'Book summary:Survival in Auschwitz is a mostly straightforward narrative, beginning with Primo Levi's deportation from Turin, Italy, to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland in 1943. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in the camp. Even Levi's most graphic descriptions of the horrors he witnessed and endured there are marked by a restraint and wit that not only gives readers access to his experience, but confronts them with it in stark ethical and emotional terms: "[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?" --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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Thousand Cranesby Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. SeidenstickerISBN 0679762655 (0-679-76265-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electraby Eugene O'Neill, Luann WaltherISBN 0679763961 (0-679-76396-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra'Book summary:These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' hearts. [via]
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchby Philip K. DickISBN 0679736662 (0-679-73666-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Transparent Thingsby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679725415 (0-679-72541-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Ubikby Philip K. DickISBN 0679736646 (0-679-73664-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Virgin and the Gypsyby D. H. LawrenceISBN 0679740775 (0-679-74077-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The War of the Worldsby H. G. Wells, Tom KiddISBN 0688131379 (0-688-13137-9)
Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The War of the Worlds'Book summary:This is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories, first published by H.G. Wells in 1898. The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator tells readers that "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's..."
Things then progress from a series of seemingly mundane reports about odd atmospheric disturbances taking place on Mars to the arrival of Martians just outside of London. At first the Martians seem laughable, hardly able to move in Earth's comparatively heavy gravity even enough to raise themselves out of the pit created when their spaceship landed. But soon the Martians reveal their true nature as death machines 100-feet tall rise up from the pit and begin laying waste to the surrounding land. Wells quickly moves the story from the countryside to the evacuation of London itself and the loss of all hope as England's military suffers defeat after defeat. With horror his narrator describes how the Martians suck the blood from living humans for sustenance, and how it's clear that man is not being conquered so much a corralled. --Craig E. Engler [via]
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The Waste Land and Other Writingsby T. S. Eliot, Mary KarrISBN 0679641017 (0-679-64101-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Waste Land and Other Writings'Book summary:First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."
As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.
In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience. [via]More editions of The Waste Land and Other Writings:
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The Wizard of Ozby Charles Santore, L. Frank BaumISBN 0679887563 (0-679-88756-3)
Hardcover, Random House Children's Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wizard of Oz'Book summary:For many of us, the adventures of Dorothy in Oz will forever be associated not with Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" but with W. W. Denslow's exceedingly odd line drawings for the original editions of Baum's Oz series. The Viennese artist Lisbeth Zwerger, however, goes a long way toward providing a new and refreshed set of images for the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the humbug wizard. These illustrations are often cockeyed, with occasional realistic details thrown in, like a crow with a corncob in its beak in the first portrait of the Scarecrow. The characters have a poignance and oddity that escaped the makers of the Oz movie. [via]
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The Wonderful Wizard of Ozby L. Frank Baum, W. W. DenslowISBN 0688166776 (0-688-16677-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'Book summary:In spite of the fact that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is one of the most popular stories in America, relatively few people have actually read the book. It's well worth the effort! Young readers expecting rainbows, Munchkin songs, and wicked witches with burning brooms will instead find a complex country populated with mocking Hammerhead men, dainty people made out of china, and fierce monsters with heads of tigers and bodies of bears. Through the fantastic land of Oz ramble Dorothy and her trusty companions--Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion--each seeking his or her heart's desire. Although the premise of the book and the 1939 movie is the same, the book--as so often is the case--delivers a far more subtle and intricate plot. A child's imagination will run rampant in these pages as one extraordinary creature after another leads the motley crew into strange and magical adventures. (All ages) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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