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› Find signed collectible books: '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aliens Ate My Homework'
It's the weirdest alien invasion ever!
"I cannot tell a lie," says Rod Allbright. And it's the truth. Ask him a question, and he's bound to give you an honest answer. Which is why when his teacher asks what happened to last night's math assignment, Rod has to give the only answer he can: "Aliens ate my homework, Miss Maloney!"
Of course, no one believes Rod this time, so they don't bother to ask him why the aliens are here -- which is just as well, since he is sworn to silence about their secret mission; and the fact that he has been drafted to help them. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All Through the Night'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Amerika'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Audrey Hepburn's Neck'
Alan Brown's first novel is a comic tale of sexual desire and bad manners set in contemporary Tokyo. Twenty-three-year-old cartoonist Toshi is obsessed with slim American women, and his best friend, an American named Paul, is obsessed with Japanese men. Toshi begins having an affair with Jane, his English teacher, who turns out to be insane; Paul has an endless stream of Japanese boyfriends all of whom leave him. Audrey Hepburn's Neck is slyly funny and very observant. Brown is equally concerned with sex as an obsession and the erotics of cultural differences, but his comic masterstrokes are in being able to conjure up the humor in looking for sex and the sometimes tragedy in getting it. Audrey Hepburn's Neck is resonant, charming and very witty. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bad Behavior'
Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Mary Gaitskill's arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature.
Set in Manhattan's Lower East Side and peopled with working-class drug addicts, intelligent hookers, stable housewives, smug yuppies, and sensually deprived professionals, Bad Behavior depicts a cruel and tender world where romance and modern perversity go hand in hand. Gaitskill delivers powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire that depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation groping for human connection. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bag of Bones'
No longer content to be the prolific provider of text, King grabs the audio reigns to recount this haunted tale of grief, young love, and otherworldly visits. When 40-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan returns to his lakeside cabin to process his wife's death, he finds the place a beacon for nightmares and ghoulish visits. But there's hope in Kingsville, as this struggling writer falls in love with a young widow named Mattie and her 3-year-old psychic daughter, Kyra. If you've never heard King speak, be warned: 19-plus hours of his western Maine, nasal-drenched tones may be more than some listeners can bear. But there's a certain warmth and believability to King's voice--after all, it's his book and he is a middle-aged bestselling novelist--that jive well with Noonan's character. And since King rarely reads his own work, perhaps his doing so indicates that he's especially pleased with Bag of Bones; most listeners should be as well. (Running time: 19.5 hours, 14 cassettes) --Rob McDonald [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Before I Say Good-bye'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Billy Budd, Sailor'
Billy Budd, Sailor has been called the best short novel ever written. In his brilliantly condensed narrative prose, Herman Melville fashions a legal parable in which reason and intellect prove incapable of preserving innocence in the face of evil. For all those who feel themselves threatened by a hostile and inflexible environment, there is special significance in this haunting story of a handsome sailor who becomes a victim of man's intransigence.
Since its posthumous publication in 1924, Billy Budd has become one of the acknowledged masterpieces of American literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Common Prayer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Christmas Box Collection'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chroma'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness'
Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, the noted author's most enduring nonfiction work, is an account of Abbey's seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Abbey reflects on the nature of the Colorado Plateau desert, on the condition of our remaining wilderness, and on the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world. He also recounts adventures with scorpions and snakes, obstinate tourists and entrenched bureaucrats, and, most powerful of all, with his own mortality. Abbey's account of getting stranded in a rock pool down a side branch of the Grand Canyon is at once hilarious and terrifying. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Devil in a Blue Dress'
Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins has few illusions about the world--at least not about the world of a young black veteran in the late 1940s in Southern California. His stint in the Army didn't do anything to dissuade him from his belief that justice doesn't come cheap, especially for men like him. "I thought there might be some justice for a black man if he had money to grease it," Easy says. Fired from his job on the line at an aircraft plant, he's in danger of losing his home, symbol of his tenuous hold on middle class status. That's a good enough reason to accept a white man's offer to pay him for finding a beautiful, mysterious Frenchwoman named Daphne Monet, last seen in the company of a well-known gangster. Easy's search takes the reader to an L.A. few writers have shown us before--the mean streets of South Central, the after-hours joints in dirty basement clubs, the cheap hotels and furnished rooms, the places people go when they don't want to be found. Evocative of a past time, and told in a style that's reminiscent of Hammet and Chandler, yet uniquely his own, Mosley's depiction of an inherently decent man in a violent world of intrigue and corruption rang up big sales when it was published in 1990 (although the movie version, with Denzel Washington as Easy, never found the audience it deserved). The minor characters are deftly and brilliantly developed, especially Mouse, who saves Easy's life even as he draws him deeper into the mystery of Daphne Monet. Like many of Mosley's characters, Mouse makes a return appearance in the succeeding Easy Rawlins mysteries, such as A Red Death, Black Betty, and White Butterfly, every one of which is as good as Devil in a Blue Dress, his first. --Jane Adams [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dream Jungle'
Jessica Hagedorn has received enormous critical acclaim for her edgy, high-energy novels chronicling the clash and embrace of American and Filipino cultures. With Dream Jungle, she breaks through to a new level of narrative daring and has written her most complex and accomplished novel to date. Dream Jungle takes off from two seemingly unrelated events-the discovery of a lost Stone Age tribe in a remote mountainous area of the Philippines and the filming of an epic Vietnam War movie in the rain forest. But the "lost tribe" just might be a clever hoax masterminded by a brooding wealthy iconoclast-and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and egos. At once a sensual and razor-sharp indictment of colonialism, Dream Jungle evokes the desperate beauty and rank corruption of the Philippines from the height of the Marcos era in the mid-1970s to the end of the twentieth century. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Echoes down the Corridor : Collected Essays, 1944-2000'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'End Zone'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Family Markowitz'
The stories in this collection are so linked and consistent, the book is almost a novel. It tells the comic and endearing history of a family of archetypal American Jews. Rose, the finicky and irrational Jewish mother, becomes increasingly dependent on Percodan and on her two sons, Ed, a hard-headed academic, and Henry, an arty dilettante. Ed's writer wife Sara suffers through teaching creative writing at the local Jewish Community Center. Ed painfully endures an interfaith weekend with crushingly banal Christian ecumenists, even though both he and Sara are completely irreligious. Meanwhile their daughter Miriam alarms them by rediscovering Judaism. Goodman, whose stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, delights the reader with recognition of the funny in the familiar. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer'
Farm lyrically recounts a year in the lives of Tom and Sally Bauer, solid Midwesterners who work the bottomlands of the Missouri River to grow "a harvest few city people could have identified ... the foundation of their diet, the principal food plant of the Western world": corn. The two rise before dawn in all kinds of weather, tending to the hundreds of tasks farmers must master in the face of heavy odds--foreclosures, climbing interest rates, a then-sickening economy, and, always, the uncertainties of the weather and the health of their crops. Richard Rhodes makes it clear that their lives are hard, but the Bauers love to till the soil. Doubtless few urbanites will want to don bib overalls after reading Farm, but anyone who reads the book will appreciate the difficulty of farmers' lives and the courage of those who lead them. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fixer'
A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
"The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.
[via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Floating in My Mother's Palm'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Forrest Gump'
Six foot six, 242 pounds, and possessed of a scant IQ of 70, Forrest Gump is the lovable, surprisingly savvy hero of this classic comic tale. His early life may seem inauspicious, but when the University of Alabamas football team drafts Forrest and makes him a star, it sets him on an unbelievable path that will transform him from Vietnam hero to world-class Ping-Pong player, from wrestler to entrepreneur. With a voice all his own, Forrest is telling all in a madcap romp through three decades of American history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Friend of the Earth'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Frolic of His Own'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'George Orwell's 1984'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon'
Trisha McFarland is a plucky 9-year-old hiking with her brother and mom, who is grimly determined to give the kids a good time on their weekends together. Trisha's mom is recently divorced, and her brother is feuding with her for moving from Boston to small-town Maine, where classmates razz him. Trisha steps off the trail for a pee and a respite from the bickering. And gets lost.
Trisha's odyssey succeeds on several levels. King renders her consciousness of increasing peril beautifully, from the "first minnowy flutter of disquiet" in her guts to her into-the-wild tumbles to her descent into hallucinations, the nicest being her beloved Red Sox baseball pitcher Tom Gordon, whose exploits she listens to on her Walkman. The nature writing is accurate, tense, and sometimes lyrical, from the maddening whine of the no-see-um mosquito to the profound obbligato of the "Subaudible" (Trisha's dad's term for nature's intimations of God). Our identification with Trisha deepens as we learn about her loved ones: Dad, a dreamboat whose beer habit could sink him; loving but stubborn Mom; Trisha's best pal, Pepsi Robichaud, vividly evoked by her colorful sayings ("Don't go all GIRLY on me, McFarland!"). The personal associations triggered by a full moon, the running monologue with which she stays sane--we who have been lost in woods will recognize these things.
In King's revealing Amazon.com interview, he said the one book he wishes he'd written was Lord of the Flies. When Trisha confronts a vision of buzzing horror in the middle of the woods, King creates his strongest echo yet of the central passage of Golding's novel. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing'
Jane Rosenal, the narrator of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is wise beyond her years. Not that that's saying much--since none of her elders, with the exception of her father, is particularly wise. At the age of 14, Jane watches her brother and his new girlfriend, searching for clues for how to fall in love, but by the end of the summer she's trying to figure out how not to fail in love. At twice that age, Jane quickly internalizes How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, even though that retro manual is ruining her chances at happiness. In the intervening years, Melissa Bank's heroine struggles at love and work. The former often seems indistinguishable from the latter, and her experiences in book publishing inspire little in the way of affection. As Jane announces in "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine": "I'd been a rising star at H----- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane."
Bank's first collection has a beautiful, true arc, and all the sophistication and control her heroine could ever desire. In "The Floating House," Jane and her boyfriend, Jamie, visit his ex-girlfriend in St. Croix, and right from the start she can't stop mimicking her beautiful competitor, in a notably idiotic fashion. "I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive," she realizes--one of several thousand of Bank's ruefully funny phrases. But even as Jane clowns around, desperately trying to keep up appearances, she is so hyperaware it hurts. Again and again, the author explores the dichotomy between life as it happens and the rehearsed anecdote, the preferred outcome. In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, even suburban quiet has "nothing to do with peace." Bank's much-anticipated debut merits all its buzz and, more to the point, transcends it. --Kerry Fried [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Green Mile'
Read this history-making serial novel -- from cliffhanger to cliffhanger -- in its entirety. When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list -- simultaneously -- and delighted millions of fans the world over. Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs...and yours. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Green Mile: The Complete Serial Novel'
This novel taps into what Stephen King does best: character-driven storytelling. The setting is the small "death house" of a Southern prison in 1932. The charming narrator is an old man looking back on the events, decades later. Maybe it's a little too cute, maybe the pathos is laid on a little thick, but it's hard to resist the colorful personalities and simple wonders of this supernatural tale. As Time magazine put it, "Like the best popular art, The Green Mile has the courage of its cornier convictions ... the palpable sense of King's sheer, unwavering belief in his tale is what makes the novel work as well as it finally does." And it's not a bad choice for giving to someone who doesn't understand the appeal of Stephen King, because the one scene that is out-and-out gruesome can be easily skipped by the squeamish. The Green Mile was nominated for a 1997 Bram Stoker Award. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hearts in Atlantis'
With his idiosyncratic blend of patrician airs and boyish charm, narrator William Hurt provides a wonderful complement to this wildly imaginative collection of short stories by author Stephen King. Hurt carefully weaves the disparate elements into a cohesive whole, embracing the subtle complexities of each character; one moment a wizened sadness leaks into his voice as a haunted old man, pursued by demons, asks his 11-year-old lookout, "You know everyone on this street, on this block of this street anyway? And you'd know strangers? Sojourners? Faces of those unknown?" Then, in a profound yet almost imperceptible switch, he exposes the boy's naive enthusiasm, "I think so." Right about here your neck hairs will stand at attention. Hurt's peculiar vocal style is in perfect pitch to King's dark, surreal vision of growing up amid the monsters of post-Vietnam America. (Running time: 21 hours, 16 cassettes) --George Laney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herman Melville's Billy Budd'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hotel New Hampshire'
The first of my fathers illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels. So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they dream on in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.
[via]More editions of The Hotel New Hampshire:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Indigo'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Isabel's Bed'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack London's the Call of the Wild and White Fang'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jewel'
The year is 1943 and life is good for Jewel Hilburn, her husband, Leston, and their five children. Although there's a war on, the Mississippi economy is booming, providing plenty of business for the hardworking family. And even the news that eldest son James has enlisted is mitigated by the fact that Jewel, now pushing 40, is pregnant with one last child. Her joy is slightly clouded, however, when her childhood friend Cathedral arrives at the door with a troubling prophecy: "I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo' hardship, be yo' test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel."
When the child is finally born, it seems that Cathedral's prediction was empty: the baby appears normal in every way. As the months go by, however, Jewel becomes increasingly afraid that something is wrong with little Brenda Kay--she doesn't cry, she doesn't roll over, she's hardly ever awake. Eventually husband and wife take the baby to the doctor and are informed that she is a "Mongolian Idiot," not expected to live past the age of 2. Jewel angrily rebuffs the doctor's suggestion that they institutionalize Brenda Kay. Instead the Hilburns shoulder the burdens--and discover the unexpected joys--of living with a Down's syndrome child.
Bret Lott has written a novel that spans decades, follows the lives of several characters, and cuts back and forth between Mississippi and California. Given these challenges, a lesser writer might lose focus. Lott, however, has wisely chosen to keep his eye trained on Jewel--a narrator who is smart, perceptive, and above all, honest. He has also bucked the trend toward political correctness by allowing his characters to think, feel, and talk the way white Mississippians of that era would have. ("Mongolian Idiot," "nigger," "cracker," and "buck" are just a few of the epithets sprinkled throughout the text.) The language may be discomforting to some readers. Few will deny, however, that Bret Lott has crafted a clan that is all heart in this bittersweet paean to the enduring strength of familial love. --Margaret Prior [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Kon-Tiki'
435pages. poche. Broché. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kon-Tiki'
Six men on a small raft sail four thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean, from Peru to the Polynesian Islands. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lake News'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Less Than Zero'
Clay comes home to L.A. for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs. Morally barren, ethically bereft and tinged with implicit violence, "Less Than Zero" is a shocking coming-of-age novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money. "An extraordinarily accomplished first novel." - "New Yorker." "One of the most disturbing novels I've read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." - Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times." "The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation." - "USA Today." "Remarkable. A killer - sexy, sassy, sad." - "Village Voice." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Birds'
Few women writers dare celebrate the sexual experience as fully as Anais Nin. Taking off where Delta of Venus left off, Little Birds explores passion in all its forms. Evocative, compelling and superbly erotic, this is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality. HC: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lonesome Dove'
Larry McMurtry, in books like The Last Picture Show, has depicted the modern degeneration of the myth of the American West. The subject of Lonesome Dove, cowboys herding cattle on a great trail-drive, seems like the very stuff of that cliched myth, but McMurtry bravely tackles the task of creating meaningful literature out of it. At first the novel seems the kind of anti-mythic, anti-heroic story one might expect: the main protagonists are a drunken and inarticulate pair of former Texas Rangers turned horse rustlers. Yet when the trail begins, the story picks up an energy and a drive that makes heroes of these men. Their mission may be historically insignificant, or pointless--McMurtry is smart enough to address both possibilities--but there is an undoubted valor in their lives. The result is a historically aware, intelligent, romantic novel of the mythic west that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lovingkindness'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lust'
Men and women from their teenage years to their early thirties are vividly portrayed in this collection of stories as they fall in love, live together, fight, and break up. They inhabit a world where traditional values of marriage and family no longer exist. This group of young artists, journalists, lawyers, and actors living in New York City find it easier to decode the intricacies of the fast track than the more basic ones of the human heart. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Meridian'
A Black woman who grew up amid prejudice and poverty in the South finds comfort and strength in the civil-rights movement. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Miami'
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island ninety miles to the south.
As Didion follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Monkeys'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith'
The first voice we hear in Gina B. Nahai's second novel is that of Lili, the grown daughter of a miraculous mother. When Lili was 5 and living in the Jewish ghetto of Tehran, her mother, Roxanna, "had grown wings, one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams, and flown into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her." Thirteen years would pass, Lili informs us, before she would find her mother again. This short introduction serves as a framing device for the story of Roxanna's life, a life begun as a "bad-luck" child. According to her sister, Miriam the Moon, she "had been a runaway before she ever became a wife or a mother, before she came into existence or was even conceived."
There is an unwritten rule that any book featuring such character names as Roxanna the Angel, Miriam the Moon, and Alexandra the Cat must also contain a great deal of magical realism; Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith lives up to expectations. In addition to Roxanna's winged departure from her home and family, there are episodes involving illuminated sunflowers, dreams of flight that result in beds of white feathers, and Roxanna's final illness, a "mysterious fluid that ... started to fill her body like a poisonous presence, that oozed out of the corner of her eyes, swelled her arms and legs till she had no more use of them and turned her once-magical voice into a gurgling whisper." Besides the miraculous, this novel has undeniable sweep, beginning in Tehran, touching down in Turkey, and ending up in Los Angeles many years later with hair-raising adventures punctuating each change of address. Gina B. Nahai has crafted a lyrical novel reminiscent of the work of Isabelle Allende. Readers with a taste for the fantastic will enjoy this tale. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mosquitoes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Gal Sunday'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Teacher Is an Alien'
Sixth grade is just out of this world...
Susan Simmons can tell that her new substitute teacher is really weird. But she doesn't know how weird until she catches him peeling off his face -- and she realizes that "Mr. Smith" is really an alien!
At first no one will believe her -- except Peter Thompson, the class brain. When Peter and Susan discover Mr. Smith's horrible plans for their classmates, they know they have to act fast. Only they can get rid of their extra-terrestrial visitor -- and save the rest of the sixth grade class from a fate worse than math tests! [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'My Year of Meats'
At first glance, a novel that promises to expose the unethical practices of the American meat industry may not be at the top of your reading list, but Ruth Ozeki's debut, My Year of Meats is well worth a second look. Like the author, the novel's protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker; like Ozeki, who was once commissioned by a beef lobbying group to make television shows for the Japanese market, Jane is invited to work on a Japanese television show meant to encourage beef consumption via the not-so-subliminal suggestion that prime rib equals a perfect family:
TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: Tokyo Office
DATE: January 5, 1991
RE: My American Wife!...
Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!
DESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: "Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!")
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house...
UNDESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples
The series, My American Wife!, initally seems like a dream come true for Jane as she criss-crosses the United States filming a different American family each week for her Japanese audience. Naturally, the emphasis is on meat, and Ozeki has fun with out-there recipes such as rump roast in coke and beef fudge; but as Jane becomes more familiar with her subject, she becomes increasingly aware of the beef industry's widespread practice of using synthetic estrogens on their cattle and determines to sabotage the program.
Cut to Tokyo where Akiko Ueno struggles through the dull misery of life with her brutish husband, who happens to be in charge of the show's advertising. After seeing one of Jane's subversive episodes about a vegetarian lesbian couple, Akiko gets in touch and the two women plot to expose the meat industry's hazardous practices. Romance, humor, intrigue, and even a message--My Year of Meats has it all. This is a book that even a vegetarian would love. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Northern Lights: A Novel'
Here is that special first novel that touches the heart, that gets "discovered" by one person and passed on from friend to friend. ". . . an original, entertaining account of a boy's coming of age . . . an impossible novel to dislike."--The Washington Post. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Old New York'
The four novellas collected here take place in the New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Each reveals the codes and customs that ruled society of that time, drawn with the perspicacious eye and style that is uniquely Wharton's. Novellas include "False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark" and "New Year's Day". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft'
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Once upon a Time on the Banks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Patrimony: A True Story'
With the honesty of a skilled biographer and the sensitivity of a caring son, Roth chronicles the life of his father, Herman, in this gripping work which won a 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award. Roth holds little back in describing his father as a man of rare intensity and fierce independence who, for better or worse, stood by his principles and held others to his own rigorous standards. Writes Roth, "His obsessive stubbornness--his stubborn obsessiveness--had very nearly driven my mother to a breakdown in her final years." Frank throughout, Roth calls his father "a pitiless realist, but I wasn't his offspring for nothing, and I could be pretty realistic, too." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Peyton Place'
First published in 1956, PEYTON PLACE uncovers the passions, lies and cruelties that simmer beneath the surface of a postcard-perfect town. At the centre of the novel are three women, each with a secret to hide: Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife; her daughter Allison, whose dreams are stifled by small-town small-mindedness; and Selena Cross, her gypsy-eyed friend from the wrong side of the tracks. 'PEYTON PLACE shocked America with its tale of secrets, sex and hypocrisy in a small New Hampshire town . . Saucy, compelling, and surprisingly literary ...A crafty, page-turning brew of illicit sex, secret lives, public drunkenness, abortion, incest and murder ...A scandalous phenomenon' VANITY FAIR [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Play It As It Lays'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Robert Frost's Poems'
Here in one volume are selected poems of Robert Frost, accompanied by an introduction and commentary by Louis Untermeyer. They make up an anthology that will bring you numberless hours of pleasure and joy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Romeo and Juliet'
This is undoubtedly the greatest love story ever written, spawning a host of imitators on stage and screen, including Leonard Bernstein's smash musical West Side Story, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet filmed in 1968, and Baz Luhrmann's postmodern film version Romeo + Juliet. The tragic feud between "Two households, both alike in dignity/In fair Verona", the Montagues and Capulets, which ultimately kills the two young "star-crossed lovers" and their "death-marked love" creates issues which have fascinated subsequent generations. The play deals with issues of intergenerational and familial conflict, as well as the power of language and the compelling relationship between sex and death, all of which makes it an incredibly modern play. It is also an early example of Shakespeare fusing poetry with dramatic action, as he moves from Romeo's lyrical account of Juliet--"she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" to the bustle and action of a 16th-century household (the play contains more scenes of ordinary working people than any of Shakespeare's other works). It also represents an experimental attempt to fuse comedy with tragedy. Up to the third act, the play proceeds along the lines of a classic romantic comedy. The turning point comes with the death of one of Shakespeare's finest early dramatic creations--Romeo's sexually ambivalent friend Mercutio, whose "plague o' both your houses" begins the play's descent into tragedy, "For never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo". --Jerry Brotton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rules of Attraction'
Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan eighties, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the futureor even the presentwho become entangled in a curious romantic triangle. Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturing and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. Lauren changes boyfriends every time she changes majors and still pines for Victor, who split for Europe months ago, and she might or might not be writing anonymous love letters to ambivalent, hard-drinking Sean, a hopeless romantic who only has eyes for Lauren, even if he ends up in bed with half the campus and with Paul, Laurens ex, who is forthrightly bisexual and whose passion masks a shrewd pragmatism. They waste time getting wasted and race from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed to Get Screwed parties to drinks at the End of the World. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short History of a Small Place: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Silent Night'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Skull of Truth'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Songs in Ordinary Time'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sonnett'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'T. C. Boyle Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Time and Again'
Si Morley is ordered by the American Government to go back to the New York of 1882 on the track of a historical mystery involving fraud and murder by arson. It is in the old New York, with its horse-drawn buses, sleigh rides and vegetable allotments between the streets, that Morley falls in love. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Tours Of The Black Clock'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet'
This is undoubtedly the greatest love story ever written, spawning a host of imitators on stage and screen, including Leonard Bernstein's smash musical West Side Story, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet filmed in 1968, and Baz Luhrmann's postmodern film version Romeo + Juliet. The tragic feud between "Two households, both alike in dignity/In fair Verona", the Montagues and Capulets, which ultimately kills the two young "star-crossed lovers" and their "death-marked love" creates issues which have fascinated subsequent generations. The play deals with issues of intergenerational and familial conflict, as well as the power of language and the compelling relationship between sex and death, all of which makes it an incredibly modern play. It is also an early example of Shakespeare fusing poetry with dramatic action, as he moves from Romeo's lyrical account of Juliet--"she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" to the bustle and action of a 16th-century household (the play contains more scenes of ordinary working people than any of Shakespeare's other works). It also represents an experimental attempt to fuse comedy with tragedy. Up to the third act, the play proceeds along the lines of a classic romantic comedy. The turning point comes with the death of one of Shakespeare's finest early dramatic creations--Romeo's sexually ambivalent friend Mercutio, whose "plague o' both your houses" begins the play's descent into tragedy, "For never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo". --Jerry Brotton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'True Grit'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Two for the Dough'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Two Girls, Fat and Thin'
A story about two women, contrastingly different but powerfully drawn to one another. As their relationship develops, they reveal what lies beneath the surface of their suburban childhoods - violence, pain, intimacy, isolation, denial, fulfilment and the betrayal of love and innocence. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We'll Meet Again'
We'll Meet Again is filled with the ingredients that Mary Higgins Clark devotees will devour: fast-paced suspense, double-crossing villains, romantic intrigue, and a resounding showdown at the end. Harder to swallow is the excessive use of theatricals whenever the author describes a satanic like HMO, and its legion of evil doctors. The darkest knight of all is Peter Black, whose eyes "were cold, angry, menacing--certainly not the eyes of a healer." Still, melodrama aside, Higgins Clark still knows how to spin a good yarn.
Her heroine in We'll Meet Again is an investigative reporter named Fran Simmons, who is not unlike the bright, resourceful Dr. Susan Chandler in You Belong to Me. Fran has just been hired to work on a popular new TV show called True Crime. Coincidentally, her very first assignment involves an ex-pupil from her old high school, the posh Cranden Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut. Molly Lasch had been incarcerated in her mid-20s, accused of pulverizing her husband's head with a Remington bronze sculpture. The murder of this community doctor, and chief executive officer of a local HMO, stunned Greenwich.
For half a decade Molly claimed to have no memory of the event, but now out on parole, slivers of memory trickle back--and Molly informs the press that someone else was in the house at the time of her husband's murder. Few people believe her--even less so when a key witness from the original trial is stabbed to death and evidence links Molly to the scene of the crime. It's up to the ever vigilant Fran to investigate what the police won't--and she unearths some very dark and extremely dirty secrets that will further shock the quiet community. --Naomi Gesinger [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where You Once Belonged'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'
"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Year Of The French'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'You Belong to Me'
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