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Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon

ISBN 0312282990 (0-312-28299-0)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:
- Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: ISBN 0312282990 (0-312-28299-0)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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The Annotated Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
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- The Annotated Lolita: ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath, Frances McCullough

ISBN 0060573090 (0-06-057309-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]
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The Book of Illusions : A Novel
by Paul Auster

ISBN 0805054081 (0-8050-5408-1)
Hardcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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- The Book of Illusions : A Novel: ISBN 0805054081 (0-8050-5408-1)
  Hardcover, Holt & Company, Henry
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Cider House Rules
by John Irving

ISBN 0345387651 (0-345-38765-1)
Softcover, Ballantine Books

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First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch-saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. [via]
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The Cider House Rules: Here in St. Cloud's
by John Irving, Peter Parnell

ISBN 0822217252 (0-8222-1725-2)
Softcover, Dramatist's Play Service

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- The Cider House Rules: Here in St. Cloud's: ISBN 0822217252 (0-8222-1725-2)
  Softcover, Dramatist's Play Service
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Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier

ISBN 1405835672 (1-4058-3567-2)
Softcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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Book summary:
Winner of the 1997 National Book Award

A New York Times and Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year

Charles Frazier has created a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendour and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving. [via]
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A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

ISBN 0802130208 (0-8021-3020-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Lana Lee and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl

ISBN 0812971043 (0-8129-7104-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
The New York Times Bestseller

Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dantes Inferno. Only an elite group of Americas first Dante scholarsHenry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fieldscan solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dantes literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer. [via]
More editions of The Dante Club:
- The Dante Club: ISBN 0812971043 (0-8129-7104-3)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
El Club Dante/The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl

ISBN 8432296325 (84-322-9632-5)
Softcover, Seix Barral

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- El Club Dante/The Dante Club: ISBN 8432296325 (84-322-9632-5)
  Softcover, Seix Barral
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El Viejo Y El Mar / the Old Man And the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 9687968613 (968-7968-61-3)
Softcover, Libros Sin Fronteras Inventory

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Book summary:
Una de las historias más grandes jamás contadas

En Cuba, un viejo pescador ya en el crepúsculo de su vida, pobre y sin suerte, cansado de regresar cada día sin pesca, emprende una última y arriesgada travesía en busca de una gran pieza. Cuando al fin logra dar con ella, comienza una feroz lucha. Y el regreso a puerto, con el acoso de los elementos y los tiburones, se convierte en una última prueba. Como un rey mendigo, coronado por su imbatible dignidad, el viejo pescador culmina finalmente su destino.

En la cúspide de su maestría, Hemingway alumbró una historia en cuya sencillez vibra el clásico tema del valor ante la derrota, del triunfo personal sacado de la pérdida. El viejo y el mar lo confirmó como uno de los escritores más significativos del siglo XX, obteniendo el Premio Pulitzer y allanando su carrera hacia el Premio Nobel.
[via]
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- El Viejo Y El Mar / the Old Man And the Sea: ISBN 9687968613 (968-7968-61-3)
  Softcover, Libros Sin Fronteras Inventory
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 0684803356 (0-684-80335-6)
Softcover, Scribner

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Book summary:
For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him.
"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"
In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria.
For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Gilead: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson

ISBN 1594131244 (1-59413-124-4)
Softcover, Thorndike Press

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Book summary:
In 1981, Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and became a modern classic. Since then, she has written two pieces of nonfiction: Mother Country and The Death of Adam. With Gilead, we have, at last, another work of fiction. As with The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzards's return, 22 years after The Transit of Venus, it was worth the long wait. Books such as these take time, and thought, and a certain kind of genius. There are no invidious comparisons to be made. Robinson's books are unalike in every way but one: the same incisive thought and careful prose illuminate both.
The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfectability of man.
The reason for the letter is Ames's failing health. He wants to leave an account of himself for this son who will never really know him. His greatest regret is that he hasn't much to leave them, in worldly terms. "Your mother told you I'm writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you?" In the course of the narrative, John Ames records himself, inside and out, in a meditative style. Robinson's prose asks the reader to slow down to the pace of an old man in Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. Ames writes of his father and grandfather, estranged over his grandfather's departure for Kansas to march for abolition and his father's lifelong pacifism. The tension between them, their love for each other and their inability to bridge the chasm of their beliefs is a constant source of rumination for John Ames. Fathers and sons.
The other constant in the book is Ames's friendship since childhood with "old Boughton," a Presbyterian minister. Boughton, father of many children, favors his son, named John Ames Boughton, above all others. Ames must constantly monitor his tendency to be envious of Boughton's bounteous family; his first wife died in childbirth and the baby died almost immediately after her. Jack Boughton is a ne'er-do-well, Ames knows it and strives to love him as he knows he should. Jack arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of charm and mischief, causing Ames to wonder what influence he might have on Ames's young wife and son when Ames dies.
These are the things that Ames tells his son about: his ancestors, the nature of love and friendship, the part that faith and prayer play in every life and an awareness of one's own culpability. There is also reconciliation without resignation, self-awareness without deprecation, abundant good humor, philosophical queries--Jack asks, "'Do you ever wonder why American Christianity seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?'"--and an ongoing sense of childlike wonder at the beauty and variety of God's world.
In Marilynne Robinson's hands, there is a balm in Gilead, as the old spiritual tells us. --Valerie Ryan [via]
More editions of Gilead: A Novel:
- Gilead: A Novel: ISBN 1594131244 (1-59413-124-4)
  Softcover, Thorndike Press
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The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers
by Nicholas Fearn

ISBN 0802143474 (0-8021-4347-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
The work of the classic philosophers is well known. But what do contemporary thinkers say about what it is to be a human being? In his serious, challenging, and remarkably accessible new book, Nicholas Fearn turns to contemporary philosophers to ask the age old questions: Who am I? What do I know? What should I do? In his search for higher meaning, Fearn consults with thinkers from around the world (including John Searle, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, among many others) to create an impressive survey of recent thought. Variously, they believe that free will, identity, and consciousness are not what they seem; that the difference between virtue and wickedness can be a matter of sheer luck; and that, one day, we will all be vegetarians. Fearn discovers that the topics havent changed, though our world has. Or has it? Moving deftly from pop culture to the writings of Plato, Philosophy is a brilliant and entertaining guide to the current state of the philosophical thought.
[via]
More editions of The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers:
- The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers: ISBN 0802143474 (0-8021-4347-4)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Light in August
by William Faulkner

ISBN 0808563386 (0-8085-6338-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
To declare that Light in August is William Faulkner's finest work would be to invoke debate of irreconcilable conclusion. Yet for many followers of Faulkner, this novel showcases many of his best moments and characters. As usual, he mines the rich soil of Mississippi mud to create his subjects, this time in the form of Reverend Gail Hightower, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas. The issue of black and white and rich and poor is prevalent, though to draw lines that clear would be a disservice to Faulkner's immensely layered text and the multicolored beauty of his writing. [via]
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- Light in August: ISBN 0808563386 (0-8085-6338-6)
  Hardcover, Bt Bound
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Light in August: A Study in Black and White
by Alwyn Berland

ISBN 0805780505 (0-8057-8050-5)
Hardcover, Twayne Pub

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- Light in August: A Study in Black and White: ISBN 0805780505 (0-8057-8050-5)
  Hardcover, Twayne Pub
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]
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Lolita
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Lolita: ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
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Marie and Bruce: A Play
by Wallace Shawn

ISBN 0802130186 (0-8021-3018-6)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
When Marie decides to leave Bruce, she delivers herself of a torrent of ferocious humor and foul-mouthed vituperation concerning him and their marriage, not to mention love, hate, caring, commitment, and all the other current clichés about relationships. As he follows Marie and Bruce through breakfast, a friends party, and dinner, Wallace Shawn brilliantly orchestrates her savage attacks and his slyly passive defenses into a symphony of subversive propositions about the nature of the marital state.
[via]
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- Marie and Bruce: A Play: ISBN 0802130186 (0-8021-3018-6)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides

ISBN 0312422156 (0-312-42215-6)
Softcover, Picador USA

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"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." & I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]
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Moon Palace
by Paul Auster

ISBN 0140115854 (0-14-011585-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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- Moon Palace: ISBN 0140115854 (0-14-011585-4)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Novels 1930-1935
by William Faulkner, Joseph Blotner

ISBN 0940450267 (0-940450-26-7)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Between 1930 and 1935, William Faulkner came into full possession of the genius and creativity that made him America's greatest writer of the twentieth century. "As I Lay Dying" is a dark comedy, full of horror and compassion, of a rural Mississippi family bearing the corpse of their matriarch to burial in town. "Sanctuary," a violent novel of sex and social class that moves from Mississippi back roads to the flesh-pots of Memphis, features a sadistic gangster named Popeye and a debutante with an affinity for evil. "Light in August," a near-religious vision of the hopeful stubbornness of ordinary life, is perhaps Faulkner's most moving work. "Pylon," a tale of barnstorming aviators, examines the bonds of loyalty and desire among three men and a woman. All are presented in restored texts as part of The Library of America's new, authoritative edition of Faulker's complete works. [via]
More editions of Novels 1930-1935:
- Novels 1930-1935: ISBN 0940450267 (0-940450-26-7)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 0684801221 (0-684-80122-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus [via]
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The Old Man And the Sea
by Hemingway

ISBN 0684163268 (0-684-16326-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Size is approx 4" x 6" x 1/4" [via]
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- The Old Man And the Sea: ISBN 0684163268 (0-684-16326-8)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth

ISBN 156849324X (1-56849-324-X)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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- Portnoy's Complaint: ISBN 156849324X (1-56849-324-X)
  Hardcover, Buccaneer Books
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James

ISBN 1404325794 (1-4043-2579-4)
Softcover, IndyPublish.com

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Book summary:
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Widely regarded as Henry Jamess greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the authors most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.

As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabels life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.

Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.
Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of storiesThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3Wwhich won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Scribners British Writers, and on Nerve.com.
[via]
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

ISBN 1417642149 (1-4176-4214-9)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel. [via]
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Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places
by Peter Nabokov

ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian

For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
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- Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places: ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Spanish

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El Club Dante/ The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl, VICENTE VILLACAMPA

ISBN 8432217204 (84-322-1720-4)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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Book summary:
Una magistral obra de suspense mundialmente aclamada. Boston, 1865. Importantes personalidades est´n siendo brutalmente asesinadas por un criminal inspirado en los tormentos del Infierno de Dante. Sólo los miembros del club Dante --poetas y profesores de Harvard dirigidos por Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-- pueden anticiparse al asesino e identificarle. Mientras preparan la primera traducción americana de La divina comedia enfrentándose a la oposición de la puritana vieja guardia de Harvard, los intelectuales deberán convertirse en detectives y pasar a la acción. Nicholas Ray, el primer policía negro del departamento de Boston, dirigirá la investigación oficial mientras los miembros del club llevan a cabo sus insólitas pesquisas. Un dantesco infierno medieval se cierne sobre las calles de la ciudad, en una época que toca a su fin, convulsa por la recién terminada guerra civil, el asesinato del presidente Lincoln y los disturbios raciales. Comparada insistentemente con El nombre de la rosa, de Umberto Eco, aclamada por la crítica con una unanimidad asombrosa y refrendada por el público con su presencia en las listas de los libros más vendidos de New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, entre otros, El club Dante (http://www.seix-barral.es/club-dante) está a punto de ser publicada en veintiún países antes de ser llevada al cine. Matthew Pearl ha logrado un equilibrio perfecto entre realidad y ficción, una novela histórica de suspense que sorprende de principio a fin. [via]
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- El Club Dante/ The Dante Club: ISBN 8432217204 (84-322-1720-4)
  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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La Conjura De Los Necios
by T.j. Kennedy

ISBN 8433920421 (84-339-2042-1)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Book summary:
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologia y geometria" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
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  Softcover, Ld Books Inc
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La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

ISBN 8496333604 (84-96333-60-4)
Softcover, Quinteto

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Book summary:
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologiÂa y geometriÂa" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
More editions of La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces:
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  Softcover, Quinteto
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El Libro de Las Ilusiones / THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS
by Paul Auster

ISBN 8433969978 (84-339-6997-8)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Book summary:
Novela cambiante como una sesion de magia, que explora los limites entre culpabilidad e inocencia, la obsesion y la locura. [via]
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- El Libro de Las Ilusiones / THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS: ISBN 8433969978 (84-339-6997-8)
  Softcover, Ld Books Inc
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov, Enrique Tejedor

ISBN 8433920383 (84-339-2038-3)
Hardcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.

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Esta es la historia de la obsesion de Humbert Humbert, un profesor cuarenton, por la doceañera Lolita. Es una extraordinaria novela de amor en la que intervienen dos componentes explosivos: la atraccion "perversa" por las ninfulas y el incesto. Narrada con autoironia y lirismo desenfrenado, es tambien un retrato acido y visionario de los Estados Unidos, de los horrores suburbanos y de la cultura del plastico y del motel. [via]
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- Lolita: ISBN 8433920383 (84-339-2038-3)
  Hardcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.
Por Quien Doblan Los Campanas / for Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway, Lola De Aguado

ISBN 8408021508 (84-08-02150-8)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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Principes De Maine
by John Irving

ISBN 8472239373 (84-7223-937-3)
Softcover, Ediciones Urano

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  Softcover, Ediciones Urano
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El Veijo y el Mar
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 0307274195 (0-307-27419-5)
Softcover, Random House Mondadori

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Book summary:
Una de las historias más grandes jamás contadas

En Cuba, un viejo pescador ya en el crepúsculo de su vida, pobre y sin suerte, cansado de regresar cada día sin pesca, emprende una última y arriesgada travesía en busca de una gran pieza. Cuando al fin logra dar con ella, comienza una feroz lucha. Y el regreso a puerto, con el acoso de los elementos y los tiburones, se convierte en una última prueba. Como un rey mendigo, coronado por su imbatible dignidad, el viejo pescador culmina finalmente su destino.

En la cúspide de su maestría, Hemingway alumbró una historia en cuya sencillez vibra el clásico tema del valor ante la derrota, del triunfo personal sacado de la pérdida. El viejo y el mar lo confirmó como uno de los escritores más significativos del siglo XX, obteniendo el Premio Pulitzer y allanando su carrera hacia el Premio Nobel.
[via]
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- El Veijo y el Mar: ISBN 0307274195 (0-307-27419-5)
  Softcover, Random House Mondadori
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El Viejo Y El Mar
by Fabio Silva Vallejo

ISBN 9583008028 (958-30-0802-8)
Softcover, Panamericana Pub Llc

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  Softcover, Panamericana Pub Llc

French

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L'Oeuvre De Dieu, LA Part Du Diable
by John Irving

ISBN 2020257807 (2-02-025780-7)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
733pages. poche. Poche. [via]
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  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

Italian

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Il Vecchio E Il Mare
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 8804488255 (88-04-48825-5)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
Un vecchio pescatore cubano lotta contro un gigantesco pescespada, simbolo della fierezza e della libertà della natura. [via]
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- Il Vecchio E Il Mare: ISBN 8804488255 (88-04-48825-5)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

German

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Gottes Werk Und Teufels Beitrag
by John Irving

ISBN 3257218370 (3-257-21837-0)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
Slight signs of wear! [via]
More editions of Gottes Werk Und Teufels Beitrag:
- Gottes Werk Und Teufels Beitrag: ISBN 3257218370 (3-257-21837-0)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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