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books tagged “American literature” (american literature / American Literature)
books tagged “American literature”
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The 158-Pound Marriageby John IrvingISBN 0394484142 (0-394-48414-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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1876by Gore VidalISBN 0375708723 (0-375-70872-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Agony and the Ecstasyby Irving StoneISBN 0385010923 (0-385-01092-3)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Archy and Mehitabelby Don MarquisISBN 0385094787 (0-385-09478-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Archy and Mehitabel'Book summary:Of all the literary genres, humor has the shortest shelf life--except for Archy and Mehitabel, that is. First published in 1916, it is a classic of American literature. Archy is a cockroach, inside whom resides the soul of a free-verse poet; he communicates with Don Marquis by leaping upon the keys of the columnist's typewriter. In poems of varying length, Archy pithily describes his wee world, the main fixture of which is Mehitabel, a devil-may-care alley cat.
Archy music will linger in your head long after you finish the book. Here's a tiny taste from his interview with a mummy:
"what ho
my regal leatherface says igreetings
little scatter footed
scarab
says he"Writers (particularly journalists) can go lifetimes without attaining such loose-limbed grace. And the illustrations by George Herriman ("Krazy Kat") provide the perfect counterpoint. On top of all that, Marquis did the impossible: he made a cockroach loveable. [via]
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Arundelby Kenneth Lewis RobertsISBN 0385040245 (0-385-04024-5)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nceby James JohnsonISBN 0393972860 (0-393-97286-0)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Bech: A Bookby John UpdikeISBN 0394416384 (0-394-41638-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bech: A Book'Book summary:In this classic novel by John Updike, we return to a character as compelling and timeless as Rabbit Angstrom: the inimitable Henry Bech. Famous for his writer's block, Bech is a Jew adrift in a world of Gentiles. As he roams from one adventure to the next, he views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make you laugh with delight and wince in recognition. [via]
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Black and Blueby Anna QuindlenISBN 0385333137 (0-385-33313-7)
Softcover, Delta
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black and Blue'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 1998: "The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old," begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. "Frannie, Frannie, Fran"--as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances--was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child. Fran's salvation comes in the form of Patty Bancroft and Co., a relocation agency for abused women that touts better service than the witness protection program. Armed only with a phone number, a few hundred dollars, and the help of several anonymous volunteers, Fran begins a new life. The agency relocates her to Florida, where she becomes Beth Crenshaw, a recently divorced home-care assistant from Delaware. Fran and her son adapt, meeting challenges with unexpected resilience and resolve until their past returns to haunt them. Quindlen renders the intricacies of spousal abuse with eerie accuracy, taking the reader deep within the realm of dysfunctional human ties. However, her vivid descriptions of abuse, emotional disintegration, and acute loneliness at times numb the reader with their realism. [via]
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The Caine Mutinyby Herman WoukISBN 0385040539 (0-385-04053-9)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Charming Billyby Alice McDermottISBN 038533334X (0-385-33334-X)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charming Billy'Book summary:Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity and resignations hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens', New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve." After World War II, both young men had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family--"marvelling, marvelling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives." By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the US, Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anaesthesia of alcohol. Alice McDermott's quiet, striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial wishes. She seems far less interested in the shock of revelation than in her characters' power to live through personal disaster. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide. Amazon.com [via]
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Chesapeakeby James A. MichenerISBN 0394500792 (0-394-50079-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chesapeake'Book summary:One of James A. Michener's grandest most loved, #1 best-selling works: the huge, enthralling novel, set amid the natural and historic riches of the Chesapeake, which dramatically brings to life -- through almost four centuries -- our land, our history, our people. [via]
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Chokeby Chuck PalahniukISBN 0385720920 (0-385-72092-0)
Softcover, Anchor Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Choke'Book summary:We can more or less deduce the following of the main protagonist in Choke; Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a medical school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzehimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.
"Art never comes from happiness" says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case--in the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.
Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palanhiuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot but suffice to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with that book and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, such as this sceptical slight on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."
Whether this is the novel that will break Palanhiuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does on the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better ... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels, Amazon.com [via]
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City of Glassby Bob Callahan, Paul Auster, Art Spiegelman, David Mazzucchelli, Paul KarasikISBN 038077108X (0-380-77108-X)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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› Find signed collectible books: 'City of Glass'Book summary:I cannot possibly offer enough praise for David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik 's adaptation of City of Glass. While some critics found it to be a dry choice of books to turn into a comics, I think the interplay between image and text only heightens the original metafictional narrative. The treatment of the first speech by the crazy antagonist, Peter Stillman--in which the word balloons trail from random objects such as a broken television and a bottle of ink--is brilliant. Neon Lit: Paul Auster's City of Glass deftly illustrates why comics is a perfect format for exploring fictions about text: the words become visible objects of the story. [via]
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Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957by W. H. AudenISBN 0394403339 (0-394-40333-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Dandelion Wineby Ray BradburyISBN 0380977265 (0-380-97726-5)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dandelion Wine'Book summary:World-renowned fantasist Ray Bradbury has on several occasions stepped outside the arenas of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. An unabashed romantic, his first novel in 1957 was basically a love letter to his childhood. (For those who want to undertake an even more evocative look at the dark side of youth, five years later the author would write the chilling classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.)
Dandelion Wine takes us into the summer of 1928, and to all the wondrous and magical events in the life of a 12-year-old Midwestern boy named Douglas Spaulding. This tender, openly affectionate story of a young man's voyage of discovery is certainly more mainstream than exotic. No walking dead or spaceships to Mars here. Yet those who wish to experience the unique magic of early Bradbury as a prose stylist should find Dandelion Wine most refreshing. --Stanley Wiater [via]
Democracy: An American Novelby Henry Adams, Arthur Meier SchlesingerISBN 037576058X (0-375-76058-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Desperate Charactersby Paula FoxISBN 039331894X (0-393-31894-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desperate Characters'Book summary:Meet the Bentwoods, Sophie and Otto, "both just over forty," living in Brooklyn sometime in the '60s with neither hope nor children to encourage them to work on their suffocating marriage. Such are the central subjects of Paula Fox's enthralling Desperate Characters, first published to much acclaim in 1970. The novel's action unfolds in a single weekend, and includes Otto's torturous breakup with his longtime business partner, Charlie, and a visit the Bentwoods make to their country home, which they find vandalized. Everything pivots around an occurrence so ordinary as to make us marvel at the power it wields under Fox's brilliant pressure: a cat bite.
Despite Otto's protests, Sophie puts out a dish for a stray that roams the Bentwoods' neighborhood--an area which is also home to enormous poverty, and in which they, in their renovated townhouse, sit like distant royalty. The cat sinks its teeth into her hand and instantly we are plunged into the heart of what plagues every aspect of this couple's lives: the threat of rabies. Where the cat is concerned, it's literal rabies, but the book is also steeped in the sense that a kind of social rabies lurks just outside the Bentwoods' and indeed the whole world's door. As Sophie suddenly realizes at one point: "Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy."
Throughout Fox's gorgeously crafted, unflinching portrait of a dying marriage and a country at war with itself, the Bentwoods fight the desire to self-destruct like everything around them. At one point, Otto screams at Sophie: "What in God's name do you want? Do you want Charlie to murder me? Do you wish the farmhouse had been burned down?... Do you want to be rabid?" She doesn't, of course, but in a certain way, that outcome makes sense. "'God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,' she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she'd discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence." How fortunate and rare to discover such a perfect articulation of the human condition. --Melanie Rehak [via]
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The Driftersby James A. MichenerISBN 0394462009 (0-394-46200-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Drifters'Book summary:In his triumphant best seller, James Michener unfolds a powerful and poignant drama of six young runaways adrift in a world they have created out of dreams, drugs, and dedication to pleasure. With the sure touch of a master, Michener pulls us into the dark center of their private world, whether it's in Spain, Marrakech, or Mozambique, and exposes the naked nerve ends with shocking candor and infinite compassion.
"A superior, picaresque novel...and a revealing mirror held up to contemporary society."
JOHN BARKHAM REVIEWS [via]More editions of The Drifters:
Dubin's Livesby Bernard MalamudISBN 0380484137 (0-380-48413-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Edwin Mullhouseby Steven MillhauserISBN 0394480090 (0-394-48009-0)
Hardcover, Knopf
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Edwin Mullhouse'Book summary:Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at 10, is mysteriously dead at 11. As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons. [via]
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Empireby Gore VidalISBN 037570874X (0-375-70874-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire'Book summary:"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." The New York Times Book Review
In this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America's Gilded Agea period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world. [via]More editions of Empire:
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Falconerby John CheeverISBN 0394410718 (0-394-41071-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Falconer'Book summary:Falconer is set in a nightmarish prison where a convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man. Out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Saul Bellow wrote, "Falconer is splendid. It is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A." Falconer continues twenty-five years after its initial publication to be the best-selling of John Cheever's novels. RosettaBooks is proud to publish three important books from the middle of John Cheever's productive career -- Bullet Park (1969), The World of Apples (1973) and Falconer (1977). [via]
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Floating Opera and the End of the Roadby John BarthISBN 0385240899 (0-385-24089-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Floating Opera and the End of the Road'Book summary:The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road are John Barth's first two novels. Their relationship to each other is evident not only in their ribald subject matter but in the eccentric characters and bitterly humorous tone of the narratives. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on the emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama. [via]
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From Here to Eternityby James JonesISBN 0385333641 (0-385-33364-1)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'From Here to Eternity'Book summary:This is a long, satisfying, commanding novel of the soldiers who were poised on the brink of real manhood when World War II flung them unceremoniously into that abyss. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt is the nonconformist hero who refuses to box at Schofield Barracks and is slowly destroyed by his own rebelliousness. Around him, others are fighing their own small battles--and losing. It's worth noting that Jones' 1951 audience was shocked by his frank language and the sexual preoccupations of his characters. [via]
From the Dust Returnedby Ray BradburyISBN 0380789612 (0-380-78961-2)
Softcover, Avon Books
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A Gathering of Old Menby Ernest J. GainesISBN 0394514688 (0-394-51468-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Giant's Houseby Elizabeth McCrackenISBN 0385340893 (0-385-34089-3)
Softcover, Dial Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Giant's House'Book summary:An unlikely love story about a lonely spinster librarian and a younger man, forced into loneliness because of his monstrous size. Peggy Cort, the reclusive librarian in a small Cape Cod town falls for a boy 14 years her junior -- one who grows to be 8 feet 7 inches and 415 pounds. Though initially attracted out of sympathy, Peggy soon finds she has much in common with this sensitive, albeit enormous man. A romance ensues, but the unique connectedness they share -- something neither has ever felt before -- is cruelly interrupted by tragedy. [via]
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The Giverby Lois LowryISBN 0385732554 (0-385-73255-4)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Giver'Book summary:In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world and struggles against the weight of its hypocrisy. With echoes of Brave New World, in this 1994 Newbery Medal winner, Lowry examines the idea that people might freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable society. Gradually Jonas learns just how costly this ordered and pain-free society can be, and boldly decides he cannot pay the price. [via]
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Glamoramaby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0375703845 (0-375-70384-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Good Soldierby Ford Madox FordISBN 0393966348 (0-393-96634-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Soldier'Book summary:This Norton Critical Edition includes: 15 contemporary reviews; a chapter on literary impressionism with critiques by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford himself and others; critical essays that provide a variety of perspectives on the book; and Ford's letter to Stella Ford, published in 1927. [via]
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The Goodbye Lookby Ross MacDonaldISBN 0375708650 (0-375-70865-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Hawaiiby James A. MichenerISBN 0375760377 (0-375-76037-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hawaii'Book summary:In Hawaii, Pulitzer Prizewinning author James Michener weaves the classic saga that brought Hawaiis epic history vividly alive to the American public on its initial publication in 1959, and continues to mesmerize even today.
The volcanic processes by which the Hawaiian Islands grew from the ocean floor were inconceivably slow, and the land remained untouched by man for countless centuries until, little more than a thousand years ago, Polynesian seafarers made the perilous journey across the Pacific and discovered their new home. They lived and flourished in this tropical paradise according to their ancient traditions and beliefs until, in the early nineteenth century, American missionaries arrived, bringing a new creed and a new way of life to a Stone Age society. The impact of the missionaries had only begun to be absorbed when other national groups, with equally different customs, began to migrate in great numbers to the islands. The story of modern Hawaii, and of this novel, is one of how disparate peoples, struggling to keep their identity yet live with one another in harmony, ultimately joined together to build Americas strong and vital fiftieth state. [via] -
The Illustrated Manby Ray BradburyISBN 0380973847 (0-380-97384-7)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Illustrated Man'Book summary:That The Illustrated Man has remained in print since being published in 1951 is fair testimony to the universal appeal of Ray Bradbury's work. Only his second collection (the first was Dark Carnival, later reworked into The October Country), it is a marvelous, if mostly dark, quilt of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In an ingenious framework to open and close the book, Bradbury presents himself as a nameless narrator who meets the Illustrated Man--a wanderer whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos. What's even more remarkable, and increasingly disturbing, is that the illustrations are themselves magically alive, and each proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge. Or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere--without the benefit of a spaceship. Or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally--our own children. Even though most were written in the 1940s and 1950s, these 18 classic stories will be just as chillingly effective 50 years from now. --Stanley Wiater [via]
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Contexts, Criticismby Nellie Y. McKay, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Smith FosterISBN 0393976378 (0-393-97637-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Contexts, Criticism'Book summary:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first full-length narrative written by a former woman slave in America.
The text is that of the 1861 first edition. Contexts includes contemporary responses to Incidents, selections from Jacobs's other published writings, and extracts from her correspondence. Criticism includes eleven important assessments of the narrative, contributed by Jean Fagan Yellin, Ann Taves, Valerie Smith, Nellie Y. McKay, Harryette Mullen, Michelle Burnham, Nell Irvin Painter, Frances Smith Foster, Sandra Gunning, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Christine Accomando. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included. [via]More editions of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Contexts, Criticism:
The Intuitionistby Colson WhiteheadISBN 0385493002 (0-385-49300-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Intuitionist'Book summary:Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of the vertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.
Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead, "that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.
Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson [via]
Invisible Monstersby Chuck PalahniukISBN 0393319296 (0-393-31929-6)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Kalkiby Gore VidalISBN 0394420535 (0-394-42053-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kalki'Book summary:Bestselling author Gore Vidal joins the ranks of Penguin Classics. To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal's eponymous hero of KALKI, born and bred in America's Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet. [via]
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Kindredby Octavia E. ButlerISBN 0385150598 (0-385-15059-8)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kindred'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. An African American woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the 19th-century and the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. [via]
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Ladies Auxiliaryby Tova MirvisISBN 0393048144 (0-393-04814-4)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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The Lathe of Heavenby Ursula K. Le GuinISBN 0380791854 (0-380-79185-4)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lathe of Heaven'Book summary:Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fiction's greatest writers. She is also an acclaimed author of powerful and perceptive nonfiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. She has received many honors, including six Nebula and five Hugo Awards, the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Newbery, the Pilgrim, the Tiptree, and citations by the American Library Association. She has written over a dozen highly regarded novels and story collections. Her SF masterworks are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).
George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality.
The Lathe of Heaven is set in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms. Le Guin's treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged, psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God. --Cynthia Ward [via]
Lives of the Poetsby E.L. DoctorowISBN 0380699966 (0-380-69996-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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The Marble Faun : Or the Romance of Monte Beniby Nathaniel Hawthorne, Peter RobbISBN 037575928X (0-375-75928-X)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Melville's Short Novelsby Herman Melville, Dan McCallISBN 0393976416 (0-393-97641-6)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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More Die of Heartbreakby Saul BellowISBN 0385318774 (0-385-31877-4)
Softcover, Dell Publishing
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The Mosquito Coastby Paul TherouxISBN 0380619458 (0-380-61945-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mosquito Coast'Book summary:Allie Fox hates America and everything about the twentieth century. He takes his wife and two sons to the Honduran jungle to live a better, simpler life but when he starts to go mad, life for his family becomes much more frightening than ever before ... Tragedy and farce in the jungle. Harrison Ford starred in the smash-hit film. [via]
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The Norton Anthology of American Literatureby Ronald GottesmanISBN 0393950301 (0-393-95030-1)
Softcover, Norton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Norton Anthology of American Literature'Book summary:The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. First published in 1962, it has gone through nine editions in a half-century; as of 2006 there are over eight million copies in print, making it the publisher's best-selling anthology. M. H. Abrams, a critic and scholar of Romanticism, served as General Editor for its first seven editions, before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor. Spread across six volumes and divided into two sets, the anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century. [via]
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The Norton Anthology of American Literatureby Nina BaymISBN 0393929930 (0-393-92993-0)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Norton Anthology of American Literature'Book summary:Firmly grounded in the core strengths that have made it the best-selling undergraduate survey in the field, The Norton Anthology of American Literature has been revitalized in this Seventh Edition through the collaboration between three new period editors and five seasoned ones.
Under Nina Bayms direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature Since 1945by Nina BaymISBN 0393979016 (0-393-97901-6)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Norton Anthology of American Literature Since 1945'Book summary:The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present. This volumeVolume Ecovers American literature from 1945 to 2002. [via]
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820: Literature to 1820by Nina BaymISBN 0393978982 (0-393-97898-2)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820: Literature to 1820'Book summary:Previous editions are cited in Books for College Libraries, 3d ed. . In this sixth edition of the anthology, the former Volumes 1 and 2 have been divided into five individual volumes. Volume A covers American literature to 1820. A wide variety of literature is represented, including Native American [via]
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The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865: American Literature 1820-1865by Nina BaymISBN 0393979059 (0-393-97905-9)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820-1865: American Literature 1820-1865'Book summary:The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present. This volumeVolume Bcovers American literature from 1820 to 1865. [via]
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Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fictionby John CrowleyISBN 0380731061 (0-380-73106-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction'Book summary:A master literary stylist, John Crowley has carried readers to diverse and remarkable places in his award-winning, critically acclaimed novels -- from his classic fable, Little, Big , to his New York Times Notable Book, The Translator . Now, for the first time, all of his short fiction has been collected in one volume, demonstrating the scope, the vision, and the wonder of one of America's greatest storytellers. Courage and achievement are celebrated and questioned, paradoxes examined, and human frailty appreciated in fifteen tales, at once lyrical and provocative, ranging fromthe fantastic to the achingly real. Be it a tale of an expulsion from Eden, a journey through time, the dreams of a failed writer, ora dead woman's ambiguous legacy, each story in Novelties & Souvenirs is a glorious reading experience, offering delights to be savored ... and remembered. [via]
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October Lightby John GardnerISBN 0394499123 (0-394-49912-3)
Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc
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Our Gangby Philip RothISBN 0375726845 (0-375-72684-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends)by Philip RothISBN 039447886X (0-394-47886-X)
Hardcover, Random House
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Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil Warby Edmund WilsonISBN 0393312569 (0-393-31256-9)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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The Phantom Tollboothby Norton JusterISBN 0375806709 (0-375-80670-9)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Phantom Tollbooth'Book summary:"It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," Milo laments. "[T]here's nothing for me to do, nowhere I'd care to go, and hardly anything worth seeing." This bored, bored young protagonist who can't see the point to anything is knocked out of his glum humdrum by the sudden and curious appearance of a tollbooth in his bedroom. Since Milo has absolutely nothing better to do, he dusts off his toy car, pays the toll, and drives through. What ensues is a journey of mythic proportions, during which Milo encounters countless odd characters who are anything but dull.
Norton Juster received (and continues to receive) enormous praise for this original, witty, and oftentimes hilarious novel, first published in 1961. In an introductory "Appreciation" written by Maurice Sendak for the 35th anniversary edition, he states, "The Phantom Tollbooth leaps, soars, and abounds in right notes all over the place, as any proper masterpiece must." Indeed.
As Milo heads toward Dictionopolis he meets with the Whether Man ("for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be"), passes through The Doldrums (populated by Lethargarians), and picks up a watchdog named Tock (who has a giant alarm clock for a body). The brilliant satire and double entendre intensifies in the Word Market, where after a brief scuffle with Officer Short Shrift, Milo and Tock set off toward the Mountains of Ignorance to rescue the twin Princesses, Rhyme and Reason. Anyone with an appreciation for language, irony, or Alice in Wonderland-style adventure will adore this book for years on end. (Ages 8 and up) [via]
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Pictures from an Institutionby Randall JarrellISBN 038049650X (0-380-49650-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Propertyby Valerie MartinISBN 0375713301 (0-375-71330-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Property'Book summary:From the acclaimed author of Mary Reilly, a groundbreaking novel that reexamines the questions of power and resistance, violence and sex, which inform all her work.
Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion, PROPERTY takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction: the voice of a woman slave holder. Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, self-absorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride, bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husbands mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.
PROPERTY is riveting fiction, fast, richly plotted, shimmering with visual detail. It is also an invitation to re-examine the traditions of the Southern novel and the myth of the chivalrous South, and a haunting meditation on what Valerie Martin has called the fantastic and constant perversity of the oppressor to feel victimized by the oppressed. [via] -
Red Dragonby Thomas HarrisISBN 0385319673 (0-385-31967-3)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Red Dragon'Book summary:Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. As in Silence, the pulse-pounding suspense plot involves a hypersensitive FBI sleuth who consults psycho psychiatrist Lecter for clues to catching a killer on the loose.
The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn't what bugs him about crime busting. It's just too creepy to get inside a killer's twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who's been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham's insight, and Graham needs Lecter's genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell.
That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He's obsessed with William Blake's bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there's a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde's terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem--she's way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn't give in to Grandma's violent advice.
This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven't read it, you've never had the creeps. --Tim Appelo [via]
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The Reefby Edith WhartonISBN 0380815494 (0-380-81549-4)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
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Rommel Drives on Deep into Egyptby Richard BrautiganISBN 0385288646 (0-385-28864-6)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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Running Dogby Don DelilloISBN 0394501438 (0-394-50143-8)
Hardcover, Knopf
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Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poemsby Billy CollinsISBN 0375755195 (0-375-75519-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems'Book summary:Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Americas Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience. [via]
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Sartorisby William FaulknerISBN 0394443756 (0-394-44375-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Souls of Black Folkby Henry Louis Gates, W. E. B. Du Bois, Terri Hume OliverISBN 039397393X (0-393-97393-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Souls of Black Folk'Book summary:When it was published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk revolutionized thinking about the experience of African Americans in the United States.This collection of essays on African American history, culture, and society probes fundamental issues of race and justice and documents Du Bois's conviction that the "soul" of the black community must be preserved and revered. The text reprinted here is that of the first book edition (1903). "Contexts" presents a fascinating collection of political and biographical documents related to the text. Also included are eighteen photographs that accompanied Du Bois's 1901 article "The Negro As He Really Is." "Criticism" offers thirteen contemporary and recent assessments of Du Bois and Souls, rounding out the picture of this enduring work. [via]
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Spanking the Maidby Robert CooverISBN 0394179714 (0-394-17971-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Editionby Stephen KingISBN 0385199570 (0-385-19957-0)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition'Book summary:In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookstores and beg them not to buy it.
The Stand is like that. You either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. Stephen King's most popular book, according to polls of his fans, is an end-of-the-world scenario: a rapidly mutating flu virus is accidentally released from a U.S. military facility and wipes out 99 and 44/100 percent of the world's population, thus setting the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil.
"I love to burn things up," King says. "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."
There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book. --Fiona Webster [via]
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Stories in an Almost Classical Modeby Harold BrodkeyISBN 0394506995 (0-394-50699-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stories in an Almost Classical Mode'Book summary:Eighteen stories, most of them novella-length, are collected here. They formthe basis of Brodkey's reputation as a great 20th-century American writer andspan three decades. [via]
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The Sunlight Dialoguesby John Champlin GardnerISBN 039447144X (0-394-47144-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sunlight Dialogues'Book summary:[via]John Gardners sweeping portrait of the collision of opposing philosophical perspectives in 1960s America, centering on the appearance of a mysterious stranger in a small upstate New York townOne summer day, a countercultural drifter known only as the Sunlight Man appears in Batavia, New York. Jailed for painting the word LOVE across two lanes of traffic, the Sunlight Man encounters Fred Clumly, a sixty-four-year-old town sheriff. Throughout the course of this impressive narrative, the dialogue between these two men becomes a microcosm of the social unrest that epitomized America during this significant historical periodand culminates in an unforgettable ending.Beautifully expansive and imbued with exceptional social insight, The Sunlight Dialogues is John Gardners most ambitious work andestablished him as one of the most important fiction writers in postWorld War II America.This ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives.More editions of The Sunlight Dialogues:
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Suttreeby Cormac McCarthyISBN 0394482131 (0-394-48213-1)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Suttree'Book summary:This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity. 'Suttree marks McCarthy's closest approach to autobiography and is probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of his books' Stanley Booth 'The book comes at us like a horrifying flood. The language licks, batters, wounds -- a poetic, troubled rush of debris ...Cormac McCarthy has little mercy to spare, for his characters or himself. His text is broken, beautiful and ugly in spots...Suttree is like a good, long scream in the ear.' Jerome Charyn, New York Times [via]
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Theophilus Northby Thornton WilderISBN 0380001608 (0-380-00160-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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Theory of the Leisure Classby Thorstein B. Veblen, Alan WolfeISBN 0375757872 (0-375-75787-2)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Theory of the Leisure Class'Book summary:Almost a century after its original publication, Thorstein Veblen's work is as fresh and relevant as ever. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class is in the tradition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, yet it provides a surprisingly contemporary look at American economics and society. Establishing such terms as "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation," Veblen's most famous work has become an archetype not only of economic theory, but of historical and sociological thought as well. As sociologist Alan Wolfe writes in his Introduction, Veblen "skillfully . . . wrote a book that will be read so long as the rich are different from the rest of us; which, if the future is anything like the past, they always will be." [via]
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The Translatorby John CrowleyISBN 0380815370 (0-380-81537-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Translator'Book summary:John Crowley's The Translator is a novel with a time bomb ticking over its head. It takes place during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as an American coed develops a complicated relationship with an exiled Russian poet who is her college professor, poetic collaborator, and perhaps lover. Innokenti Falin is a man of many secrets--but then, so is Christa Malone. Growing up, her father spoke only vaguely about his work with the government and computers; her Green Beret brother died under mysterious circumstances in Southeast Asia; and Christa herself has a few things in her past that she'd rather not contemplate.
In their power to evoke the physical pleasures of poetry, the scenes in which Falin and Malone work together evoke A.S. Byatt's Possession, another gripping novel about language and the life of the mind. Improbably, Crowley even makes the act of translation sexy:
She thought, long after, that she had not then ever explored a lover's body, learned its folds and articulations, muscle under skin, bone under muscle, but that this was really most like that: this slow probing and working in his language, taking it in or taking hold of it; his words, his life, in her heart, in her mouth too.
The novel's principal shortcoming is that it can't quite make up its mind whether it's a cloak-and-dagger cold war novel or a less realistic fable about love, loss, and the power of art. Nonetheless, as the depiction of an era, a passion, and one woman's helplessness in the face of history, The Translator succeeds. Much can be forgiven of a book that makes us feel that words are important--that they can in fact change the world. --Mary Park [via] -
The Vampire Armandby Anne RiceISBN 0375704159 (0-375-70415-9)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Vampire Armand'Book summary:In The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice returns to her indomitable Vampire Chronicles and recaptures the gothic horror and delight she first explored in her classic tale Interview with the Vampire (in which Armand, played by Antonio Banderas in the film version, made his first appearance as director of the Théâtre des Vampires).
The story begins in the aftermath of Memnoch the Devil. Vampires from all over the globe have gathered around Lestat, who lies prostrate on the floor of a cathedral. Dead? In a coma? As Armand reflects on Lestat's condition, he is drawn by David Talbot to tell the story of his own life. The narrative abruptly rushes back to 15th-century Constantinople, and the Armand of the present recounts the fragmented memories of his childhood abduction from Kiev. Eventually, he is sold to a Venetian artist (and vampire), Marius. Rice revels in descriptions of the sensual relationship between the young and still-mortal Armand and his vampiric mentor. But when Armand is finally transformed, the tone of the book dramatically shifts. Raw and sexually explicit scenes are displaced by Armand's introspective quest for a union of his Russian Orthodox childhood, his hedonistic life with Marius, and his newly acquired immortality. These final chapters remind one of the archetypal significance of Rice's vampires; at their best, Armand, Lestat, and Marius offer keen insights into the most human of concerns.
The Vampire Armand is richly intertextual; readers will relish the retelling of critical events from Lestat and Louis's narratives. Nevertheless, the novel is very much Armand's own tragic tale. Rice deftly integrates the necessary back-story for new readers to enter her epic series, and the introduction of a few new voices adds a fresh perspective--and the promise of provocative future installments. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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The Whore's Child and Other Storiesby Richard RussoISBN 0375726012 (0-375-72601-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Wielandby Caleb Crain, Charles Brockden BrownISBN 0375759034 (0-375-75903-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Wieland : Or, the Transformationby Charles Brockden BrownISBN 0385031009 (0-385-03100-9)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Wild Boys a Book of the Deadby W. S. BurroughsISBN 039417819X (0-394-17819-X)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wild Boys a Book of the Dead'Book summary:The Wild Boys is a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states. Making full use of his inimitable humor, wild imagination, and style, Burroughs creates a world that is as terrifying as it is fascinating.[via]More editions of Wild Boys a Book of the Dead:
Without Feathersby Woody AllenISBN 0394497430 (0-394-49743-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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