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books tagged “american lit” (American lit)
books tagged “american lit”
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Adventures of Augie Marchby Saul BellowISBN 0613170695 (0-613-17069-5)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Adventures of Augie March'Book summary:Among the names in the papers in 1953-from Khrushchev to Charlie Chaplin, from Dwight Eisenhower to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth-was Saul Bellow's, whose The Adventures of Augie March attracted enormous attention for its fresh, bold, exhilarating voice and thrust Saul Bellow into the international literary limelight.
Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, Viking is reissuing Bellow's landmark novel in a beautiful new hardcover edition, with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. The Adventures of Augie March set the stage for Bellow's Nobel Prize Award in 1976 and established him as a crucial voice that demanded to be heard. Fifty years later, it remains the best loved of Bellow's works as new readers discover this vital, truly American masterpiece. [via]More editions of Adventures of Augie March:
The Ambassadorsby Henry JamesISBN 0678028214 (0-678-02821-4)
Hardcover, Scholars Book Shelf
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The Americanby Henry JamesISBN 0678028028 (0-678-02802-8)
Hardcover, Scholars Book Shelf
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The American'Book summary:Henry James brilliantly combines comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama in this tale of a wealthy American businessman in Paris. Determined to marry Claire de Cintré, a scintillating and beautiful aristocrat, Christopher Newman comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family in a dramatic clash between the Old World and the New. A co-production with the BBC, starring Diana Rigg, Matthew Modine, and Brenda Fricker. [via]
Angle of Reposeby Wallace StegnerISBN 0606218971 (0-606-21897-1)
Hardcover, Demco Media
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angle of Repose'Book summary:Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.
"Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel," wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. "[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is 'historical,' an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike re-creation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction."
"Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything--about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future. . . . It reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers' feet beat dusty."
--Wallace Stegner [via]-
Atlas Shruggedby Ayn RandISBN 0525948929 (0-525-94892-9)
Hardcover, E P Dutton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Atlas Shrugged'Book summary:The story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world--and did. This novel is the setting for the author's philosophy of Objectivism. [via]
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Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Storiesby Carson McCullersISBN 0618565868 (0-618-56586-8)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ballad of the Sad Cafe'Book summary:A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose cafe serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers' first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. [via]
More editions of Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories:
- Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories: ISBN 0553239805 (0-553-23980-5)
Softcover, Bantam Books - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories: ISBN 0553272543 (0-553-27254-3)
Softcover, Bantam Books - Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories: ISBN 055335423X (0-553-35423-X)
Hardcover, Bantam Books - Ballad of the Sad Cafe: ISBN 0618565868 (0-618-56586-8)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
- Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories: ISBN 0553239805 (0-553-23980-5)
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Bluest Eyeby Toni MorrisonISBN 0671742922 (0-671-74292-2)
Softcover, Pocket Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bluest Eye'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]
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The Bonesetter's Daughterby Amy TanISBN 0613426673 (0-613-42667-3)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter'Book summary:At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.
A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."
Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting:
I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.
Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins [via]More editions of The Bonesetter's Daughter:
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The Book Of Danielby David Berlinski, E.L. DoctorowISBN 0679643370 (0-679-64337-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book Of Daniel'Book summary:The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.
Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new lifemarriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him.
In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different.
It is a confession of his most intimate relationshipswith his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him.
It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House.
It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniels interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks.
It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the caselawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself.
It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this countryits sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.
It is The Book of Daniel. [via]More editions of The Book Of Daniel:
The Book of Danielby E. L. DoctorowISBN 0679736573 (0-679-73657-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Ceremonyby Leslie Marmon SilkoISBN 0613032977 (0-613-03297-7)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ceremony'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A Navajo family on a New Mexico reservation struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II. [via]
China Menby Maxine KingstonISBN 0679723285 (0-679-72328-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Collected Poemsby Ted Hughes, Sylvia PlathISBN 0571118380 (0-571-11838-0)
Softcover, Faber and Faber
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Poems'Book summary:Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury her poetry--the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It's a relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty, hard-wrought originality, and acetylene anger. "It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat." While the juvenilia and poems written before 1960 that Ted Hughes has included here prefigure Plath's later obsessions, they also enable us to witness her turn from thesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as they gather power through raw simplicity. "The blood jet is poetry. / There is no stopping it," she declares in "Kindness." [via]
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Collected Poemsby Emily DickinsonISBN 0762405627 (0-7624-0562-7)
Hardcover, Courage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Poems'Book summary:More of literature's finest works -- completely unabridged. Irresistible prices make these books great for any classics library! [via]
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Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poeby Edgar Allan PoeISBN 0679600078 (0-679-60007-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe'Book summary:Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays. [via]
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The Complete Poemsby Elizabeth BishopISBN 0701116080 (0-7011-1608-0)
Hardcover, Chatto & Windus
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Complete Poems of Emily Dickinsonby Emily Dickinson, Thomas Herbert JohnsonISBN 0571090877 (0-571-09087-7)
Hardcover, Faber
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson'Book summary:770 pages [via]
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The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination ; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ; The Raven and Other Poemsby Edgar Allan PoeISBN 0706415523 (0-7064-1552-3)
Hardcover, Octopus Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination ; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ; The Raven and Other Poems'Book summary:1984 Amaranth Press / Octopus Books; Treasury of World Masterpieces: The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination / The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym / The Raven and Other Poems [via]
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Correctionsby F. JonathanISBN 0613708490 (0-613-70849-0)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Corrections'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The winner of the National Book Awar, now in paperback. [via]
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Cosmopolisby Don DelilloISBN 0743244257 (0-7432-4425-7)
Softcover, Scribner
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cosmopolis'Book summary:Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion of admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that.
DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine (and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology), this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous journey through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epic spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel.
There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic (and disturbing) road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw [via]
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The Da Vinci Codeby Dan BrownISBN 0739326740 (0-7393-2674-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Da Vinci Code'Book summary:With The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria culled from 2,000 years of Western history.
A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his daughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's father's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself.
Brown (Angels and Demons) has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries--from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Code is an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought. --Jeremy Pugh [via]
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Emily Dickinson: Selected Poemsby Emily Dickinson, Helen McNeilISBN 0753816598 (0-7538-1659-8)
Hardcover, Phoenix Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems'Book summary:Much madness is divinest sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--that starkest Madness
--From 'Tis the Majority[via]
Emily Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst, stayed close to home, finding inspiration in the small world around her. Often writing more than a poem a day--although few were published during her lifetime--she perfected a highly personal, condensed, and enduring style. Among her most famous poems included here are: Success Is Counted Sweetest, I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed, and This Is My Letter to the World.More editions of Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems:
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Even Cowgirls Get the Bluesby Tom RobbinsISBN 055334949X (0-553-34949-X)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues'Book summary:Free-spirited hitchhiker sissy henshaw makes her way across the confused and paranoid america of the 1970s, gathering knowledge and experience, friends and lovers, and all sorts of unusual acquaintances. Reissue. Movie tie-in [via]
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Everything Is Illuminatedby Jonathan Safran FoerISBN 0618173870 (0-618-17387-0)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything Is Illuminated'Book summary:The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.
If all this sounds a little daunting, don't be put off; Safran Foer is an extremely funny as well as intelligent writer who combines some of the best Jewish folk yarns since Isaac Bashevis Singer with a quite heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, and loss. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Closeby Jonathan Safran FoerISBN 0618329706 (0-618-32970-6)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'Book summary:Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination.[via]
Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin.More editions of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Closeby Jonathan Safran FoerISBN 0618711651 (0-618-71165-1)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'Book summary:Jonathan safran foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, everything is illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history.nine-year-old oskar schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of new york. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the world trade center on the morning of september 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey [via]
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Flowers for Algernonby Daniel KeyesISBN 0553274503 (0-553-27450-3)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flowers for Algernon'Book summary:Daniel Keyes wrote little SF but is highly regarded for one classic, Flowers for Algernon. As a 1959 novella it won a Hugo Award; the 1966 novel-length expansion won a Nebula. The Oscar-winning movie adaptation Charly (1968) also spawned a 1980 Broadway musical.
Following his doctor's instructions, engaging simpleton Charlie Gordon tells his own story in semi-literate "progris riports." He dimly wants to better himself, but with an IQ of 68 can't even beat the laboratory mouse Algernon at maze-solving:
I dint feel bad because I watched Algernon and I lernd how to finish the amaze even if it takes me along time.
I dint know mice were so smart.
Algernon is extra-clever thanks to an experimental brain operation so far tried only on animals. Charlie eagerly volunteers as the first human subject. After frustrating delays and agonies of concentration, the effects begin to show and the reports steadily improve: "Punctuation, is? fun!" But getting smarter brings cruel shocks, as Charlie realizes that his merry "friends" at the bakery where he sweeps the floor have all along been laughing at him, never with him. The IQ rise continues, taking him steadily past the human average to genius level and beyond, until he's as intellectually alone as the old, foolish Charlie ever was--and now painfully aware of it. Then, ominously, the smart mouse Algernon begins to deteriorate...
Flowers for Algernon is a timeless tear-jerker with a terrific emotional impact. --David Langford [via]
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Four Quartetsby T. S. EliotISBN 0571203434 (0-571-20343-4)
Softcover, Faber & Faber Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Four Quartets'Book summary:Published in the fiery days of World War II, Four Quartets stands as a testament to the power of poetry amid the chaos of the time. Let the words speak for themselves: "The dove descending breaks the air/With flame of incandescent terror/Of which the tongues declare/The only discharge from sin and error/The only hope, or the despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--/To be redeemed from fire by fire./Who then devised this torment?/Love/Love is the unfamiliar Name/Behind the hands that wave/The intolerable shirt of flame/Which human power cannot remove./We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire." [via]
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The Human Stainby Philip RothISBN 0618059458 (0-618-05945-8)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
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If I Forget Thee, Jerusalemby William FaulknerISBN 0679741933 (0-679-74193-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Jitterbug Perfumeby Tom RobbinsISBN 0553348981 (0-553-34898-1)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jitterbug Perfume'Book summary:A story beginning in the forests of ancient Bohemia and ending at nine o'clock tonight, Paris time. The hero is a janitor with a missing bottle which is embossed with the image of a goat-horned god and is said to contain the remaining drops of the secret essence of the universe. [via]
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The Joy Luck Clubby Amy TanISBN 067972768X (0-679-72768-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Joy Luck Club'Book summary:Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]
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A Lesson Before Dyingby Ernest GainesISBN 0679455612 (0-679-45561-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Lesson Before Dying'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.
As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime. [via]
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Little Menby Louisa May AlcottISBN 0590412795 (0-590-41279-5)
Softcover, Scholastic Paperbacks
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Men'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The classic story about young boys growing up in nineteenth-century New England. [via]
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Little Men : Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boysby Louisa May Alcott, Frank T. MerrillISBN 067944503X (0-679-44503-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Men : Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys'Book summary:Follows the adventures of Jo March and her husband Professor Bhaer as they try to make their school for boys a happy, comfortable, and stimulating place. [via]
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The Lovely Bonesby Alice SeboldISBN 0606309314 (0-606-30931-4)
Hardcover, Demco Media
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lovely Bones'More editions of The Lovely Bones:
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Midwivesby Chris BohjalianISBN 0679771468 (0-679-77146-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midwives'Book summary:Midwives, Chris Bohjalian's fifth novel, is the story of two women: Sibyl Danforth, a lay midwife in rural Vermont, and her daughter, Connie. The nexus of this cautionary tale is an emergency Caesarean section Sibyl performs during a home birth that goes disastrously wrong. Believing the mother is already dead from a stroke, Sibyl operates and later finds herself on trial for killing the woman. The compelling story of her trial and its aftermath comes to us from Connie, who believes "this is my story, too." In fact, Connie's reaction to her mother's ordeal is to go to medical school and become an obstetrician. The book raises provocative issues about medical ethics and the limits of risk. [via]
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Paradiseby Toni MorrisonISBN 0679433740 (0-679-43374-0)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paradise'Book summary:Paradise is a 1997 novel by Toni Morrison, and her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. According to the author, it completes a "trilogy" that begins with Beloved and includes Jazz. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection January 1998. Morrison wanted to call the novel War but was overridden by her editor.[1] [via]
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The Pastures of Heavenby John SteinbeckISBN 0749324120 (0-7493-2412-0)
Softcover, Reed Consumer Book
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pastures of Heaven'More editions of The Pastures of Heaven:
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Poe Short Storiesby Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur RackhamISBN 0706426517 (0-7064-2651-7)
Hardcover, Octopus Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Poe Short Stories'Book summary:Many of the earliest children's books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pook Press are working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality, colour editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children. [via]
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A Prayer for Owen Meanyby John IrvingISBN 061303421X (0-613-03421-X)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'Book summary:Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of A Prayer for Owen Meany:
- A Prayer for Owen Meany: ISBN 0679642595 (0-679-64259-5)
Hardcover, Modern Library - A Prayer for Owen Meany: ISBN 0688077080 (0-688-07708-0)
Hardcover, Harpercollins - A Prayer for Owen Meany: ISBN 0688087604 (0-688-08760-4)
Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books - A Prayer for Owen Meany: ISBN 061303421X (0-613-03421-X)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
- A Prayer for Owen Meany: ISBN 0679642595 (0-679-64259-5)
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Ragtimeby E.L. DoctorowISBN 0679602976 (0-679-60297-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ragtime'Book summary:Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home
of an affluent American family.
One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disap-
pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sig- mund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]More editions of Ragtime:
- Ragtime: ISBN 0553257366 (0-553-25736-6)
Softcover, Bantam Books - Ragtime: ISBN 0679736263 (0-679-73626-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc - Ragtime: ISBN 0553010409 (0-553-01040-9)
Hardcover, Bantam Books - Ragtime: ISBN 0679600884 (0-679-60088-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - Ragtime: ISBN 0679602976 (0-679-60297-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
- Ragtime: ISBN 0553257366 (0-553-25736-6)
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Revolutionary Roadby Richard YatesISBN 0679721916 (0-679-72191-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Road'Book summary:The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.
Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgeraldby F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew Joseph BruccoliISBN 068480445X (0-684-80445-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald'Book summary:Today, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his novels, but in his lifetime, his fame stemmed from his prolific achievement as one of America's most gifted (and best-paid) writers of stories and novellas. In The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli, the country's premier Fitzgerald scholar and biographer, assembles a sparkling collection that encompasses the full scope of Fitzgerald's short fiction. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author's fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. Included are classic novellas, such as "The Rich Boy," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," as well as a remarkable body of work he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and its sister "slicks." These stories can be read as an autobiographical journal of a great writer's career, an experience deepened by the illuminating introductory headnotes that Matthew Bruccoli has written for each story, placing it in its literary and biographical context.
Together, these forty-three stories compose a vivid picture of a lost era, but their brilliance is timeless. As Malcolm Cowley once wrote, "Fitzgerald remains an exemplar and archetype, but not of the 1920s alone; in the end he represents the human spirit in one of its permanent forms." This essential collection is ample testament to that statement, and a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history of American literature. [via]
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The Souls of Black Folkby W. E. B. Du BoisISBN 0553213369 (0-553-21336-9)
Softcover, Bantam Classic & Loveswept
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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]
More editions of The Souls of Black Folk:
- The Souls of Black Folk: ISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc - The Souls of Black Folk: ISBN 067942802X (0-679-42802-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - The Souls of Black Folk: ISBN 0679601872 (0-679-60187-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - The Souls of Black Folk: ISBN 0553213369 (0-553-21336-9)
Softcover, Bantam Classic & Loveswept
- The Souls of Black Folk: ISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
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Talented Mr. Ripleyby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0762188561 (0-7621-8856-1)
Hardcover, Readers Digest
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Talented Mr. Ripley'Book summary:One of the great crime novels of the 20th century, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a blend of the narrative subtlety of Henry James and the self-reflexive irony of Vladimir Nabokov. Like the best modernist fiction, Ripley works on two levels. First, it is the story of a young man, Tom Ripley, whose nihilistic tendencies lead him on a deadly passage across Europe. On another level, the novel is a commentary on fictionmaking and techniques of narrative persuasion. Like Humbert Humbert, Tom Ripley seduces readers into empathizing with him even as his actions defy all moral standards.
The novel begins with a play on James's The Ambassadors. Tom Ripley is chosen by the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf to retrieve Greenleaf's son, Dickie, from his overlong sojourn in Italy. Dickie, it seems, is held captive both by the Mediterranean climate and the attractions of his female companion, but Mr. Greenleaf needs him back in New York to help with the family business. With an allowance and a new purpose, Tom leaves behind his dismal city apartment to begin his career as a return escort. But Tom, too, is captivated by Italy. He is also taken with the life and looks of Dickie Greenleaf. He insinuates himself into Dickie's world and soon finds that his passion for a lifestyle of wealth and sophistication transcends moral compunction. Tom will become Dickie Greenleaf--at all costs.
Unlike many modernist experiments, The Talented Mr. Ripley is eminently readable and is driven by a gripping chase narrative that chronicles each of Tom's calculated maneuvers of self-preservation. Highsmith was in peak form with this novel, and her ability to enter the mind of a sociopath and view the world through his disturbingly amoral eyes is a model that has spawned such latter-day serial killers as Hannibal Lecter. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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Tales of Mystery and Imaginationby Edgar Allan PoeISBN 0582528917 (0-582-52891-7)
Softcover, Longman Group United Kingdom
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination'Book summary:Award-winning fantasy illustrator Gary Kelley writes, "I have selected three of Edgar Allan Poe's best short stories.... I chose 'The Fall of the House of Usher' for its classic Gothic images and its dark, melancholic central characters, including the house itself. 'The Black Cat' is ... appealing to me for its use of mystery and foreboding that takes us to a horrifying climax. 'The Cask of Amontillado' ... my personal favorite, [is] a simple narrative of revenge set in the contrasting worlds of carnival and catacomb." Click on the book's cover for a closer look, but the reproduction doesn't really do justice to the richness of color in Kelley's shadowy, atmospheric paintings. (The cat's eye is green, and its tongue is pink.) This gorgeous edition has 20 full- and double-page paintings, including a melancholy portrait of Poe; each page of text is surrounded by subtle decorative frames. The images of Roderick and Madeleine Usher are especially effective. [via]
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To Have and Have Notby Ernest HemingwayISBN 0684818981 (0-684-81898-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To Have and Have Not'Book summary:First things first: readers coming to To Have and Have Not after seeing the Bogart/Bacall film should be forewarned that about the only thing the two have in common is the title. The movie concerns a brave fishing-boat captain in World War II-era Martinique who aids the French Resistance, battles the Nazis, and gets the girl in the end. The novel concerns a broke fishing-boat captain who agrees to carry contraband between Cuba and Florida in order to feed his wife and daughters. Of the two, the novel is by far the darker, more complex work.
The first time we meet Harry Morgan, he is sitting in a Havana bar watching a gun battle raging out in the street. After seeing a Cuban get his head blown off with a Luger, Morgan reacts with typical Hemingway understatement: "I took a quick one out of the first bottle I saw open and I couldn't tell you yet what it was. The whole thing made me feel pretty bad." Still feeling bad, Harry heads out in his boat on a charter fishing expedition for which he is later stiffed by the client. With not even enough money to fill his gas tanks, he is forced to agree to smuggle some illegal Chinese for the mysterious Mr. Sing. From there it's just a small step to carrying liquor--a disastrous run that ends when Harry loses an arm and his boat. Once Harry gets mixed up in the brewing Cuban revolution, however, even those losses seem small compared to what's at stake now: his very life.
Hemingway tells most of this story in the third person, but, significantly, he brackets the whole with a section at the beginning told from Harry's perspective and a short, heart-wrenching chapter at the end narrated by his wife, Marie. In between there is adventure, danger, betrayal, and death, but this novel begins and ends with the tough and tender portrait of a man who plays the cards that are dealt him with courage and dignity, long after hope is gone. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of To Have and Have Not:
- To Have and Have Not: ISBN 0684859238 (0-684-85923-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - To Have and Have Not: ISBN 0684179520 (0-684-17952-0)
Softcover, Scribner - To Have and Have Not: ISBN 068471809X (0-684-71809-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster - To Have and Have Not: ISBN 0684153289 (0-684-15328-9)
Hardcover, Macmillan Pub Co - To Have and Have Not: ISBN 0684818981 (0-684-81898-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
- To Have and Have Not: ISBN 0684859238 (0-684-85923-8)
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Tropic of Cancerby Henry MillerISBN 0613706196 (0-613-70619-6)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tropic of Cancer'Book summary:No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. [via]
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Walden And Civil Disobedienceby Henry David ThoreauISBN 0534522068 (0-534-52206-8)
Softcover, Wadsworth Pub Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walden and Civil Disobedience'Book summary:ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP
Naturalist and philosopher Thoreau's timeless essays on the role of humanity -- in the world of nature, and in society and government.
EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: " A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
" A chronology of the author's life and work
" A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
" An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
" Detailed explanatory notes
" Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work
" Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
" A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience
Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. [via]SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON
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Washington Squareby Henry James, Peter ConnISBN 0743421892 (0-7434-2189-2)
Softcover, Pocket Classics
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Washington Square'Book summary:"Washington Square is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's," said Graham Greene.
Inspired by a story Henry James heard at a dinner party, Washington Square tells how the rakish but idle Morris Townsend tries to win the heart of heiress Catherine Sloper against the objections of her father. Precise and understated, the book endures as a matchless social study of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]More editions of Washington Square:
- Washington Square: ISBN 0679732292 (0-679-73229-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group - Washington Square: ISBN 0679602763 (0-679-60276-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group - Washington Square: ISBN 0684819112 (0-684-81911-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - Washington Square: ISBN 0743421892 (0-7434-2189-2)
Softcover, Pocket Classics
- Washington Square: ISBN 0679732292 (0-679-73229-2)
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Where the Red Fern Growsby Wilson RawlsISBN 0553274295 (0-553-27429-5)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where the Red Fern Grows'Book summary:Author Wilson Rawls spent his boyhood much like the character of this book, Billy Colman, roaming the Ozarks of northeastern Oklahoma with his bluetick hound. A straightforward, shoot-from-the-hip storyteller with a searingly honest voice, Rawls is well-loved for this powerful 1961 classic and the award-winning novel Summer of the Monkeys. In Where the Red Fern Grows, Billy and his precious coonhound pups romp relentlessly through the Ozarks, trying to "tree" the elusive raccoon. In time, the inseparable trio wins the coveted gold cup in the annual coon-hunt contest, captures the wily ghost coon, and bravely fights with a mountain lion. When the victory over the mountain lion turns to tragedy, Billy grieves, but learns the beautiful old Native American legend of the sacred red fern that grows over the graves of his dogs. This unforgettable classic belongs on every child's bookshelf. (Ages 9 and up) [via]
Winter's Taleby Mark HelprinISBN 0756785391 (0-7567-8539-1)
Softcover, Diane Pub Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winter's Tale'Book summary:Surreal, dazzling, fantastic in every sense of the word, this "great gift in an hour of great need" (The New York Times Book Review) depicts a time of love and laughter with master thief Peter Lake and his flying horse. Helprin is the author of A Soldier of the Great War. [via]
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The Woman Warriorby Maxine Hong KingstonISBN 0679721886 (0-679-72188-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Woman Warrior'Book summary:The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]
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The World's Great ClassicsISBN 0717200019 (0-7172-0001-9)
Hardcover, Xs Books
Find This BookBook summary:Odyssey, The: The World's Great Classics, by Homer; tr. by S.H. Butcher and Andrew Lang [via]
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