books tagged “american” (American.)

books tagged “american”

›
› Find signed collectible books by ''
  • The 158-Pound Marriage
    by John Irving
    ISBN 034536743X (0-345-36743-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The 158-Pound Marriage'
    Book summary:

    "Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications."
    --The Washington Post

    The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive.

    "One of the most remarkable things about John Irving's first three novels, viewed from the vantage of The World According to Garp, is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise. . . . The 158-Pound Marriage is as lean and concentrated as a mine shaft."
    --Terrence Des Pres [via]

    More editions of The 158-Pound Marriage:

  • Kurlansky, Mark: 1968: The Year That Rocked The World
    1968: The Year That Rocked The World
    by Mark Kurlansky
    ISBN 0345455827 (0-345-45582-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: '1968: The Year That Rocked The World'
    Book summary:

    In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

    With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth of the womens movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe.

    Everything was disrupted. In the Middle East, Yasir Arafats guerilla organization rose to prominence . . . both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters . . . the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use . . . the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there . . . and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase womens liberation.
    Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year. It was the year that an amazed world watched the first live telecast from outer space, and that TV news expanded to half an hour. For the first time, Americans watched that days battlethe Vietnam Wars Tet Offensiveon the evening news. Television also shocked the world with seventeen minutes of police clubbing demonstrators at the Chicago convention, live film of unarmed students facing Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a war of starvation in Biafra. The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. The fact that one now needed television to make things happen was a cultural revelation with enormous consequences.

    In many ways, this momentous year led us to where we are today. Whether through youth and music, politics and war, economics and the media, Mark Kurlansky shows how, in 1968, twelve volatile months transformed who we are as a people. But above all, he gives a new understanding to the underlying causes of the unique historical phenomenon that was the year 1968. Thoroughly researched and engagingly writtenfull of telling anecdotes, penetrating analysis, and the authors trademark incisive wit1968 is the most important book yet of Kurlanskys noteworthy career.
     [via]

    More editions of 1968: The Year That Rocked The World:

  • An Acceptable Time
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0374300275 (0-374-30027-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'An Acceptable Time'
    Book summary:

    A flash of lightning, quivering ground, and, instead of her grandparents' farm, Polly sees mist and jagged mountains -- and coming toward her, a group of young men carrying spears.

    Why has a time gate opened and dropped Polly into a world that existed 3,000 years ago? Will she be able to get back to the present before the time gate closes -- and leaves her to face a group of people who believe in human sacrifice?
    [via]

    More editions of An Acceptable Time:

  • Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.: The Age of Jackson
    The Age of Jackson
    by Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.
    ISBN 0316773433 (0-316-77343-3)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Company

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Jackson'

    More editions of The Age of Jackson:

  • The Anatomy Lesson
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0374104913 (0-374-10491-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy Lesson'
    Book summary:

    Philip Roth's novel, The Anatomy Lesson , is one of the great portraits of the writer in extremis. It is a wild, raucous, daring book that cements his reputation as one of this country's premier novelists. [via]

    More editions of The Anatomy Lesson:

  • Malamud, Bernard: The Assistant
    The Assistant
    by Bernard Malamud
    ISBN 0374504849 (0-374-50484-9)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Assistant'

    More editions of The Assistant:

  • White, Edmund: The Beautiful Room Is Empty
    The Beautiful Room Is Empty
    by Edmund White
    ISBN 0345351517 (0-345-35151-7)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty'

    More editions of The Beautiful Room Is Empty:

  • Lovecraft, H. P.: Best of H.P. Lovecraft
    Best of H.P. Lovecraft
    by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch
    ISBN 0345350804 (0-345-35080-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Best of H.P. Lovecraft'

    More editions of Best of H.P. Lovecraft:

  • A Box of Matches
    by Nicholson Baker
    ISBN 0375706038 (0-375-70603-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Box of Matches'
    Book summary:

    One man's simple, colloquial meditations on his past, his family, and his life's daily minutia are the substance of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches. Feeling that life is passing him by, Emmett, a middle-aged medical textbook editor, decides to wake up early each day to sit by a fire in his country house and record his thoughts in a diary. "Good morning," Emmett begins, "it's January and its 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here in the dark." From this vantage point, Emmett reflects stream-of-consciousness style on whatever occurs to him, no matter how mundane: his recent trip to Home Depot, how he met his wife, the habits of the family duck. Routines, such as how he makes his morning coffee in the dark or picks up his underwear with his toes, are described with childlike reverence and directness. All told, nothing much happens in A Box of Matches, which seems to be the point. Baker is more interested in the idea that for many, life is made up of such apparent trivialities, and that only by pausing to appreciate them can anyone gain any lasting satisfaction. Baker emphasizes this through the moments of understated wisdom and joy that Emmett derives from ordinary occurrences, such as the daylight through the window: "a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so." This is the philosophical equivalent of a one-joke premise, however, and there are moments when Emmett's naiveté and laundry list-like narrative wear thin. Likely understanding this, Baker has wisely kept things short. A curious, often charming novel, A Box of Matches will inspire some readers, while inspiring frustration in others. --Ross Doll [via]

    More editions of A Box of Matches:

  • Caves of Steel
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345338200 (0-345-33820-0)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Caves of Steel'
    Book summary:

    A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history:  the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain.  Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together.  Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions.  But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer.  The relationship between Life and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start.  Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner:  R. Daneel Olivaw.  Worst of all was that the "R" stood for robot--and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim! [via]

    More editions of Caves of Steel:

  • McDermott, Alice: Charming Billy
    Charming Billy
    by Alice McDermott
    ISBN 0374120803 (0-374-12080-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Charming Billy'

    More editions of Charming Billy:

  • Kingston, Maxine Hong: China Men
    China Men
    by Maxine Hong Kingston
    ISBN 0345344073 (0-345-34407-3)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'China Men'

    More editions of China Men:

  • The Client
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 037543349X (0-375-43349-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Client'
    Book summary:

    With her sparkling voice and superb acting ability, Blair Brown gives an impressive reading of this John Grisham blockbuster. The story hinges on a young boy who gets an unwanted earful of murder, politics--and dangerous secrets about both--from a conscience-stricken mob lawyer bent on suicide. "I can tell you where the body is... the most notorious undiscovered corpse of our time." Just the kind of information most children don't need, especially when the snakeskin-wearing hit man finds out what he knows. Aside from musical cues scattered as superfluously as laugh tracks on a sitcom, the production quality is stellar, preserving the crispness of Blair's voice and the nuances of her excellent interpretation. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --George Laney [via]

    More editions of The Client:

  • Singer, Isaac Bashevis: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
    The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
    by Isaac Bashevis Singer
    ISBN 0374517886 (0-374-51788-6)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer'

    More editions of The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer:

  • The Confessions Of Max Tivoli
    by Andrew Sean Greer
    ISBN 0374128715 (0-374-12871-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Confessions Of Max Tivoli'
    Book summary:

    Out of the womb in 1871, Max Tivoli looked to all the world like a tiny 70-year-old man. But inside the aged body was an infant. Victim of a rare disease, Max grows physically younger as his mind matures. In Andrew Sean Greer's finely crafted novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Max narrates his life story from the vantage point of his late fifties, though his body is that of a 12-year-old boy. He has known since a young age that he is destined to die at 70, and he wears a golden "1941" as a constant reminder of the year he will finally perish in an infant form. His mother, a Carolina belle concerned over her son's troubling appearance, curses Max with "The Rule": "Be what they think you are." Max fails to keep this Rule only a handful of times in his life, but it is the burden of living by it that wounds him and slowly alienates him from the people he loves.

    Over Max's narration of the preceding decades of his life, he offers outsider's snapshots of San Francisco and all of America across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout, Greer uses the literary device of reverse aging to interrogate the evolution of social conventions, the finitude of a human life, and the decay of memory. Max wants love. But his curse destines him to deception. He loses his wife, Alice, changes his name, and remains hidden from his own son to keep his true identity secret. Only his lifelong friend, Hughie, stands by Max and can see the person inside the anachronistic body. Like the best science fiction and myth, the novel uses its central conceit to reveal human prejudice and explode all assumptions of normalcy to profound effect.

    Love is a destructive force in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. But Greer recognizes that in the failure of love is also hope. He artfully captures Max's fragile world with a delicacy that never crosses into sentimentality but also avoids the monumental scale of tragedy. As Max says near the end of the novel, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love." A journey with Max, while brave and beautiful, is hardly a waste. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

    More editions of The Confessions Of Max Tivoli:

  • A Conspiracy of Paper
    by David Liss
    ISBN 0375502920 (0-375-50292-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Conspiracy of Paper'
    Book summary:

    A fool and his money are soon parted--and nowhere so quickly as in the stock market, it would seem. In David Liss's ambitious first novel, A Conspiracy of Paper, the year is 1719 and the place London, where human greed, apparently, operated then in much the same manner as it does today. Liss focuses his intricate tale of murder, money, and conspiracy on Benjamin Weaver, ex-boxer, self-described "protector, guardian, bailiff, constable-for-hire, and thief-taker," and son of a Portuguese Jewish "stock-jobber." Weaver's father, from whom he has been estranged, has recently died, the victim of a horse-drawn carriage hit and run. Though his uncle has suggested that the accident wasn't quite so accidental, Benjamin doesn't give the idea much credence:

    I blush to own I rewarded his efforts to seek my opinion with only a formal reply in which I dismissed his ideas as nonsensical. I did so in part because I did not wish to involve myself with my family and in part because I knew that my uncle, for reasons that eluded me, had loved my father and could not accept the senselessness of so random a death.
    But then Benjamin is hired by two different men to solve two seemingly unrelated cases. One client, Mr. Balfour, claims his own father's unexpected death "was made to look like self-murder so that a villain or villains could take his money with impunity," and even suggests there might be a link between Balfour senior's death and that of Weaver's father. His next customer is Sir Owen Nettleton, an aristocrat who is keen to recover some highly confidential papers that were stolen from him while he cavorted with a prostitute. Weaver takes on the first case with some reluctance, the second with more enthusiasm. In the end, both converge, leading him back to his family even as they take him deep into the underbelly of London's financial markets.

    Liss seems right at home in the world he's created, whether describing the company manners of wealthy Jewish merchants at home or the inner workings of Exchange Alley--the 18th-century version of Wall Street. His London is a dank and filthy place, almost lawless but for the scant protection offered by such rogues as Jonathan Wilde, the sinister head of a gang of thieves who profits by selling back to their owners items stolen by his own men. Though better connected socially, the investors involved with the shady South Sea Company have equally larcenous hearts, and Liss does an admirable job of leading the reader through the intricacies of stock trading, bond selling, and insider trading with as little fuss, muss, and confusion as possible. What really makes the book come alive, however, are the details of 18th-century life--from the boxing matches our hero once participated in to the coffee houses, gin joints, and brothels where he trolls for clues. And then there is the matter of Weaver's Jewishness, the prejudices of the society he lives in, and his struggle to come to terms with his own ethnicity. A Conspiracy of Paper weaves all these themes together in a manner reminiscent of the long, gossipy novels of Henry Fielding and Laurence Stern. Indeed, Liss manages to suggest the prose style of those authors while keeping his own, less convoluted style. This is one conspiracy guaranteed to succeed. --Alix Wilber [via]

    More editions of A Conspiracy of Paper:

  • Rice, Anne: Cry to Heaven
    Cry to Heaven
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0345373707 (0-345-37370-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Cry to Heaven'

    More editions of Cry to Heaven:

  • Clowes, Daniel: David Boring
    David Boring
    by Daniel Clowes
    ISBN 0375406921 (0-375-40692-1)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'David Boring'

    More editions of David Boring:

  • The Dive from Clausen's Pier
    by Ann Packer
    ISBN 0375412824 (0-375-41282-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'
    Book summary:

    " The Dive from Clausen's Pier is one of those small miracles that reinforce our faith in fiction. It does what the best novels so often do, making the largest things visible by its perfect rendering of life on the smaller scale. It is witty, tragic and touching, and beguiling from the first page." --Scott Turow A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge, and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves. Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She's had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, Mike, now her fiancé, for as long as anyone can remember. It's with real surprise she finds that, at age twenty-three, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, for a chance to begin again. That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need? The Dive from Clausen's Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the force of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen, out of the blue, in anybody's life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen's Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist. [via]

    More editions of The Dive from Clausen's Pier:

  • Powers, Richard: The Echo Maker
    The Echo Maker
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0374146357 (0-374-14635-7)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Echo Maker'

    More editions of The Echo Maker:

  • Shand, R.T.: Economic Liberalisation in South Asia
    Economic Liberalisation in South Asia
    by R.T. Shand
    ISBN 0333931165 (0-333-93116-5)
    Hardcover, Macmillan India

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Economic Liberalisation in South Asia'

    More editions of Economic Liberalisation in South Asia:

  • O'Connor, Flannery: Everything That Rises Must Converge
    Everything That Rises Must Converge
    by Flannery O'Connor
    ISBN 0374504644 (0-374-50464-4)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Everything That Rises Must Converge'

    More editions of Everything That Rises Must Converge:

  • The Forever War
    by Joe Haldeman
    ISBN 0345324897 (0-345-32489-7)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Forever War'
    Book summary:

    In the 1970s Joe Haldeman approached more than a dozen different publishers before he finally found one interested in The Forever War. The book went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, although a large chunk of the story had been cut out before it saw publication. Now Haldeman and Avon Books have released the definitive version of The Forever War, published for the first time as Haldeman originally intended. The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can't adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass. --Craig E. Engler [via]

    More editions of The Forever War:

  • Friend of Kafka
    by Isaac Bashevis Singer
    ISBN 0374515387 (0-374-51538-7)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Friend of Kafka'

    More editions of Friend of Kafka:

  • Powers, Richard: Gain
    Gain
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0374159963 (0-374-15996-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Gain'

    More editions of Gain:

  • Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
    The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford
    ISBN 0374927731 (0-374-92773-1)
    Hardcover, Octagon Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Soldier'

    More editions of The Good Soldier:

  • The Greatest Generation
    by Tom Brokaw
    ISBN 0375705694 (0-375-70569-4)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Greatest Generation'
    Book summary:

    Veteran reporter and NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw went to France to make a documentary marking the 40th anniversary of D-day in 1984. Although he was thoroughly briefed on the historical background of the invasion, he was totally unprepared for how it would affect him emotionally. Flooded with childhood memories of World War II, Brokaw began asking veterans at the ceremony to revisit their past and talk about what happened, triggering a chain reaction of war-torn confessions and Brokaw's compulsion to capture their experiences in what he terms "the permanence a book would represent."

    After almost 15 years and hundreds of letters and interviews, Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation, a representative cross-section of the stories he came across. However, this collection is more than a mere chronicle of a tumultuous time, it's history made personal by a cast of everyday people transformed by extraordinary circumstances: the first women to break the homemaker mold, minorities suffering countless indignities to boldly fight for their country, infantrymen who went on to become some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, small-town kids who became corporate magnates. From the reminiscences of George Bush and Julia Child to the astonishing heroism and moving love stories of everyday people, The Greatest Generation salutes those whose sacrifices changed the course of American history. --Rebekah Warren [via]

    More editions of The Greatest Generation:

  • Hard Eight
    by Janet Evanovich
    ISBN 0375431705 (0-375-43170-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Hard Eight'
    Book summary:

    In Hard Eight, Stephanie Plum picks up a case a little nastier than anything the wisecracking bounty hunter's seen before. Evelyn Soder and her young daughter have gone on the run, leaving an angry ex-husband who's planning to collect on a child custody bond that will leave Evelyn's grandmother homeless. Stephanie's first clue that there's more to it than that comes in the form of Eddie Abruzzi, a shady local businessman who warns her to butt out of the case. Stephanie doesn't scare easily, but when Abruzzi's henchmen leave a bag of snakes on her doorknob and tarantulas in her car, she has no choice but to call Ranger, the hunky man of mystery whom she already owes too many favors. Steph knows that Ranger will soon be calling in his marker, but with her ex- fiancé Joe Morelli out of the picture, that should be OK--shouldn't it? In the meantime, she's got other fugitives to catch, aided by the usual band of misfits, plus a bumbling correspondence-school lawyer who's developed the hots for Stephanie's sister, Valerie. And Steph's in for a surprise from her mother, who proves she's not above wielding a dangerous weapon to save her daughter's life.

    Author Janet Evanovich has made a bold move in using a soupçon of child jeopardy to pull this series out of the comfortable but formulaic pattern it was threatening to fall into. It's still funny, and yes, some cars are destroyed, but now there's a real edge of darkness under the humor. Fans needn't fear, though: Jersey girl Stephanie is still full of sass and Tastykakes. --Barrie Trinkle [via]

    More editions of Hard Eight:

  • Harlot's Ghost
    by Norman Mailer
    ISBN 0345379659 (0-345-37965-9)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Harlot's Ghost'
    Book summary:

    "The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today."
    CHICAGO TRIBUNE
    Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country....
    A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club [via]

    More editions of Harlot's Ghost:

  • In a Sunburned Country
    by Bill Bryson
    ISBN 0375430563 (0-375-43056-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'In a Sunburned Country'
    Book summary:

    Bill Bryson follows his Appalachian amble, A Walk in the Woods, with the story of his exploits in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed, prime ministers disappear into the surf, and cheery citizens coexist with the world's deadliest creatures: toxic caterpillars, aggressive seashells, crocodiles, sharks, snakes, and the deadliest of them all, the dreaded box jellyfish. And that's just the beginning, as Bryson treks through sunbaked deserts and up endless coastlines, crisscrossing the "under-discovered" Down Under in search of all things interesting.

    Bryson, who could make a pile of dirt compelling--and yes, Australia is mostly dirt--finds no shortage of curiosities. When he isn't dodging Portuguese man-of-wars or considering the virtues of the remarkable platypus, he visits southwest Gippsland, home of the world's largest earthworms (up to 12 feet in length). He discovers that Australia, which began nationhood as a prison, contains the longest straight stretch of railroad track in the world (297 miles), as well as the world's largest monolith (the majestic Uluru) and largest living thing (the Great Barrier Reef). He finds ridiculous place names: "Mullumbimby Ewylamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong," and manages to catch a cricket game on the radio, which is like

    listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting; it's like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what's going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.

    "You see," Bryson observes, "Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I'm saying." Of course, Bryson--who is as much a travel writer here as a humorist, naturalist, and historian--says much more, and does so with generous amounts of wit and hilarity. Australia may be "mostly empty and a long way away," but it's a little closer now. --Rob McDonald [via]

    More editions of In a Sunburned Country:

  • Inherit the Wind
    by Robert E. Lee, Jerome Lawrence
    ISBN 0345466276 (0-345-46627-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Inherit the Wind'
    Book summary:

    One of the most moving and meaningful plays in American theatre--based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was tried for teaching evolution--now on Broadway starring Tony Award® Winners Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, and Directed by Tony Award® Winner Doug Hughes

    The accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American.

    Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . . . Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . Were still arguing this caseall the way to the White House.
    Chicago Tribune

    Powerful . . . a crackling good courtroom play . . . [that] provides two of the juiciest roles in American theater.
    Copley News Service

    [This] historical drama . . . deserves respect.
    The Columbus Dispatch [via]

    More editions of Inherit the Wind:

  • Chandler, Raymond: The Lady in the Lake
    The Lady in the Lake
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0345251202 (0-345-25120-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Lady in the Lake'

    More editions of The Lady in the Lake:

  • The Lady in the Lake/the Little Sister/the Long Goodbye/Playback: The Little Sister ; The Long Goodbye ; Playback
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0375415025 (0-375-41502-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Lady in the Lake/the Little Sister/the Long Goodbye/Playback: The Little Sister ; The Long Goodbye ; Playback'
    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandlers last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics.

    The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside of Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young things missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangsters on his trail, hes in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder.

    Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowes wry humor and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction. [via]

    More editions of The Lady in the Lake/the Little Sister/the Long Goodbye/Playback: The Little Sister ; The Long Goodbye ; Playback:

  • Percy, Walker: The Last Gentleman
    The Last Gentleman
    by Walker Percy
    ISBN 0374509166 (0-374-50916-6)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Gentleman'

    More editions of The Last Gentleman:

  • Shreve, Anita: The Last Time They Met
    The Last Time They Met
    by Anita Shreve
    ISBN 0316713732 (0-316-71373-2)
    Softcover, Lb Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Time They Met'
    Book summary:

    The Last Time They Met opens with two old lovers, both poets, running into each other at a writer's conference. Well, Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes aren't old, actually--just middle-aged, with a lifetime's worth of history between them. In the first section, Anita Shreve only suggests what that history contains: there was adultery, we gather, and a car accident, plus some illicit encounters under a pitiless Kenyan sun. Presumably the rest of the book will lead back to the beginnings of this grand passion, right? We think we know where this is going--but that's the tricky part, because we don't.

    The novel does get off to a slow start, with an unnecessarily drawn-out description of a luxury hotel. But it picks up speed as it moves backward in time, from the lovers' vividly evoked interlude in Africa, to their adolescent years in the Massachusetts village of Hull, and finally to Linda's deepest, darkest secret. Only then does the author unveil her final revelation, which should leave most readers somewhat out of breath, and possibly even obliged to turn back to the first page and read the book over again. Shreve is a canny storyteller, and she knows her characters inside and out. (As well she might: Thomas is the husband of Jean, the photographer in The Weight of Water.) And The Last Time They Met is yet another example of the kind of book she does best--one that's as skillfully plotted as a thriller, but with writing that lingers long after the last plot twist is unfurled. No matter whether people actually have affairs like these. Reading this book only makes you wish that they did. --Mary Park [via]

    More editions of The Last Time They Met:

  • The Last Unicorn
    by Peter S. Beagle
    ISBN 0345353676 (0-345-35367-6)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Unicorn'
    Book summary:

    The Last Unicorn is one of the true classics of fantasy, ranking with Tolkien's The Hobbit, Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Beagle writes a shimmering prose-poetry, the voice of fairy tales and childhood:

    The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.

    The unicorn discovers that she is the last unicorn in the world, and sets off to find the others. She meets Schmendrick the Magician--whose magic seldom works, and never as he intended--when he rescues her from Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, where only some of the mythical beasts displayed are illusions. They are joined by Molly Grue, who believes in legends despite her experiences with a Robin Hood wannabe and his unmerry men. Ahead wait King Haggard and his Red Bull, who banished unicorns from the land.

    This is a book no fantasy reader should miss; Beagle argues brilliantly the need for magic in our lives and the folly of forgetting to dream. --Nona Vero [via]

    More editions of The Last Unicorn:

  • Vidal, Gore: Lincoln
    Lincoln
    by Gore Vidal, Edgar Box
    ISBN 034531221X (0-345-31221-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lincoln'

    More editions of Lincoln:

  • Little Kingdoms
    by Steven Millhauser
    ISBN 0375701435 (0-375-70143-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Little Kingdoms'
    Book summary:

    Cartoons that draw their creator into another world; demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to such marvelousand often disquietingeffect in Little Kingdoms, a collection whose three novellas suggest magical companion pieces to his acclaimed longer fictions.

    In "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a gentle eccentric constructs an elaborate alternate universe that is all the more appealing for being transparently unreal. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" is at once a gothic tale of nightmarish jealousy and a meditation on the human need for exaltation and horror. And "Catalogue of the Exhibition" introduces us to the oeuvre of Edmund Moorash, a Romantic painter who might have been imagined by Nabokov or Poe. Exuberantly inventive, as mysterious as dreams, these novellas will delight, mesmerize, and transport anyone who reads them. [via]

    More editions of Little Kingdoms:

  • Love
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375409440 (0-375-40944-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Love'
    Book summary:

    The first page of Toni Morrison's novel Love is a soft introduction to a narrator who pulls you in with her version of a tale of the ocean-side community of Up Beach, a once popular ocean resort. Morrison introduces an enclave of people who react to one man--Bill Cosey--and to each other as they tell of his affect on generations of characters living in the seaside community. One clear truth here, told time and again, is how folks love and hate each other and the myriad ways it's manifested; these versions of humanity are seen in almost every line. Monsters and ghosts creep into young girls' dreams and around corners and then return to staid ladies' lives as they age and remember friendships and cold battles. Men and women--Heed, Romen, Junior, Christine, Celestial, and the rest of Morrison's cast--cry and sing out their weaknesses and strengths in rotating perspectives. Sandler, a Cosey employee, is a brilliant agent of Morrison's descriptions of human behavior, "Then, in a sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, 'My son, Billy was about your age. When he died, I mean.'" And Romen is allowed to play hero by saving a young girl from a brutal gang rape, while at the same time, he battles disgust like no superhuman would be caught dead feeling.

    Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as she came. --E. Brooke Gilbert [via]

    More editions of Love:

  • The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
    by Óscar Hijuelos
    ISBN 0374201250 (0-374-20125-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love'
    Book summary:

    Inspired by their heroes Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz, brothers Cesar and Nestor Castillo come to New York City from Cuba in 1949 with designs on becoming mambo stars. Eventually they do--performing with Arnaz on "I Love Lucy" in 1955 and recording 78s with their own band, the Mambo Kings. In his second novel, Hijuelos traces the lives of the flashy, guitar-strumming Cesar and the timid, lovelorn Nestor as they cruise the East Coast club circuit in a flamingo-pink bus. Enriching the story are the brothers' friends and family members--all driven by their own private dreams. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. [via]

    More editions of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love:

  • Miss Wyoming
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 0375707239 (0-375-70723-9)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Miss Wyoming'
    Book summary:

    The eponymous heroine of Miss Wyoming is one Susan Colgate, a teen beauty queen and low-rent soap actress. Dragooned into show business by her demonically pushy, hillbilly mother, Susan has hit rock bottom by the time Douglas Coupland's seventh book begins. But when she finds herself the sole survivor of an airplane crash, this "low-grade onboard celebrity" takes the opportunity to start all over again:

    She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains there in the wreckage and was unable to do so.... Then she was lost in a crowd of local onlookers and trucks, parping sirens and ambulances. She picked her way out of the melee and found a newly paved suburban road that she followed away from the wreck into the folds of a housing development. She had survived, and now she needed sanctuary and silence.
    She's not, of course, the only Hollywood burnout who'd like to vanish into thin air. Her opposite number, a producer of big-budget, no-brainer action flicks named John Johnson, stages a similar disappearing act. After a near-death experience, in the course of which he is treated to a vision of Susan's face, he roams the western badlands. And even after his return to L.A., Johnson is determined to unravel the mystery of this woman's fate.

    Throughout, Coupland displays his usual gift for capturing the absurdities of modern existence. The distinctive minutiae of our age--junk mail and fast food, sitcoms and Singapore slings, and the "shop fronts bigger and brighter and more powerful than they needed to be"--come to vivid, funny life in this author's hands. And while Susan and John occupy center stage, Coupland is just as generous with his peripheral characters. A scriptwriter and his supernaturally intelligent girlfriend, a recluse who spends his evening generating Internet rumours--all manage to be blessed and cursed, numbed by their pointless existences but full of humanity when put to the test. Picture Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut collaborating on a Tinseltown version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and you come halfway to grasping Coupland's brand of thoughtful, supremely funny storytelling. --Matthew Baylis [via]

    More editions of Miss Wyoming:

  • The Mummy or Ramses the Damned
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0345360001 (0-345-36000-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Mummy or Ramses the Damned'
    Book summary:

    "The reader is held captive, and, ultimately, seduced."SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLERamses the Great has awakened in Edwardian London. Having drunk the elixir of life, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied. Although he pursues voluptuous aristocrat Julie Stratford, the woman for whom he desperately longs is Cleopatra. And his intense longing for her, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger.... [via]

    More editions of The Mummy or Ramses the Damned:

  • The Natural
    by Bernard Malamud
    ISBN 0374502005 (0-374-50200-5)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Natural'
    Book summary:

    Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, makes the mistake of pronouncing aloud his dream: to be the best there ever was. Such hubris, of course, invites divine intervention, but the brilliance of Bernard Malamud's novel is the second chance it offers its hero, elevating him--and his story--into the realm of myth. [via]

    More editions of The Natural:

  • A New Life
    by Bernard Malamud, Jonathan Lethem
    ISBN 0374529493 (0-374-52949-3)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A New Life'
    Book summary:

    "An overlooked masterpiece. It may still be undervalued as Malamud's funniest and most embracing novel." --Jonathan Lethem

    In A New Life, Bernard Malamud--generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer--took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.

    When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.

    A New Life--as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear--is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.
    [via]

    More editions of A New Life:

  • The Night Before Christmas
    by Clement Clarke Moore, Tasha Tudor
    ISBN 0316832715 (0-316-83271-5)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Night Before Christmas'
    Book summary:

    "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
    Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
    The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
    In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there."

    Generations of children have thrilled to these words as their favorite holiday grows near. Clement C. Moore wrote this account of a man's encounter with St. Nicholas in 1822 to entertain his children. Since then, his charming descriptions have become the definitive portrait of Santa Claus, from his twinkling eyes to his droll little mouth to the belly that shakes like a "bowlful of jelly." In this edition, award-winning illustrator Bruce Whatley brings Moore's well-loved Christmas classic to life with his vivid pictures and unusual perspectives. Readers can practically look up Dasher and Dancer's noses at one point, in a near-3-D close-up image of Santa's flock of reindeer.

    Bright colors and clever details (one remaining leaf hangs from a tree outside the window, mice curl tightly together in a nest on a high shelf, reindeer peek mischievously over the rooftop at the unsuspecting narrator...) make this a holiday book the whole family will return to year after year. (Ages 3 to 10) --Emilie Coulter [via]

    More editions of The Night Before Christmas:

  • Nobody's Perfect : Writings from the New Yorker
    by Anthony Lane
    ISBN 0375414487 (0-375-41448-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Nobody's Perfect : Writings from the New Yorker'
    Book summary:

    In an aside that reads like a declaration of intent, Anthony Lane writes that he never quite thrilled to the battle pitched between mainstream and art cinemawhich is to say that he glories in highbrow and lowbrow alike, and respectfully suggests that the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics . . . books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

    In almost ten years as a critic for The New Yorker, Lane has not only written an indispensable column on the latest movie releases, great and small. He has also turned his gaze upon subjects as various as Evelyn Waugh, Shakespeare, the glory of cookbooks, and the fine art of the obituary. Whether he is examining Alfred Hitchcock or astronauts, to read him is to be carried along on a current of urgent inquiry (What is the point of Demi Moore?), wry reflection, and penetrating wit. An essay on The Sound of Music leads him to consider not only singing nuns but the comedy of our cultural memories (For all our searchings and suppressings, the past comes unbidden or not at all); his now infamous pieces on the best-seller lists both celebrate the exultantly bad prose of Judith Krantz and deride the marshes of the middlebrow, where serious novelists lumber around with too many ideas on their back. His writings on the poetry of Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and especially T. S. Eliot showcase his erudition, dispensed with a piercing insight into human folly. In his survey of events as disparate as Oscar night, a Walker Evans retrospective, and the craziness of a Chanel show in Paris, the acuity of Lanes intellect is matched by a quality of heart that is his alone, and by a willingness to be carried away. His writings remind us of what criticism can achieve at its best.

    Arguably the most gifted reviewer at work today, Anthony Lane sets the standardas a reader, as a critic, and as an observer of life. Nobody's Perfect is a must for fans old and new. [via]

    More editions of Nobody's Perfect : Writings from the New Yorker:

  • On Photography
    by Susan Sontag
    ISBN 0374226261 (0-374-22626-1)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'On Photography'
    Book summary:

    Susan Sontag's On Photography is a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives. "Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites". (The Times). "A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves". (Washington Post). "The most original and illuminating study of the subject". (New Yorker). One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics. [via]

    More editions of On Photography:

  • Play It As It Lays
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0374529949 (0-374-52994-9)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Play It As It Lays'
    Book summary:

    A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, and somehow detached from her past and future, Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom. Set beyond good and evil -- literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert, and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit -- Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s. Three decades after its original publication, the novel remains an intense dissection of a very particular time and place. [via]

    More editions of Play It As It Lays:

  • Powers, Richard: Plowing the Dark
    Plowing the Dark
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0374234612 (0-374-23461-2)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Plowing the Dark'

    More editions of Plowing the Dark:

  • Updike, John: Rabbit Is Rich & Rabbit at Rest
    Rabbit Is Rich & Rabbit at Rest
    by John Updike
    ISBN 0345464567 (0-345-46456-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Rabbit Is Rich & Rabbit at Rest'

    More editions of Rabbit Is Rich & Rabbit at Rest:

  • Tan, Amy: Saving Fish from Drowning
    Saving Fish from Drowning
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 034546401X (0-345-46401-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Saving Fish from Drowning'

    More editions of Saving Fish from Drowning:

  • Seabiscuit: An American Legend
    by Laura Hillenbrand
    ISBN 0345465083 (0-345-46508-3)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Seabiscuit: An American Legend'
    Book summary:

    He didn't look like much. With his smallish stature, knobby knees, and slightly crooked forelegs, he looked more like a cow pony than a thoroughbred. But looks aren't everything; his quality, an admirer once wrote, "was mostly in his heart." Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of the horse who became a cultural icon in Seabiscuit: An American Legend.

    Seabiscuit rose to prominence with the help of an unlikely triumvirate: owner Charles Howard, an automobile baron who once declared that "the day of the horse is past"; trainer Tom Smith, a man who "had cultivated an almost mystical communication with horses"; and jockey Red Pollard, who was down on his luck when he charmed a then-surly horse with his calm demeanor and a sugar cube. Hillenbrand details the ups and downs of "team Seabiscuit," from early training sessions to record-breaking victories, and from serious injury to "Horse of the Year"--as well as the Biscuit's fabled rivalry with War Admiral. She also describes the world of horseracing in the 1930s, from the snobbery of Eastern journalists regarding Western horses and public fascination with the great thoroughbreds to the jockeys' torturous weight-loss regimens, including saunas in rubber suits, strong purgatives, even tapeworms.

    Along the way, Hillenbrand paints wonderful images: tears in Tom Smith's eyes as his hero, legendary trainer James Fitzsimmons, asked to hold Seabiscuit's bridle while the horse was saddled; critically injured Red Pollard, whose chest was crushed in a racing accident a few weeks before, listening to the San Antonio Handicap from his hospital bed, cheering "Get going, Biscuit! Get 'em, you old devil!"; Seabiscuit happily posing for photographers for several minutes on end; other horses refusing to work out with Seabiscuit because he teased and taunted them with his blistering speed.

    Though sometimes her prose takes on a distinctly purple hue ("His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow"; "The California sunlight had the pewter cast of a declining season"), Hillenbrand has crafted a delightful book. Wire to wire, Seabiscuit is a winner. Highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney [via]

    More editions of Seabiscuit: An American Legend:

  • Asimov, Isaac: Second Foundation
    Second Foundation
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345336291 (0-345-33629-1)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Second Foundation'

    More editions of Second Foundation:

  • Rice, Anne: Servant of the Bones
    Servant of the Bones
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0345389417 (0-345-38941-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Servant of the Bones'
    Book summary:

    Her first book since Memnoch the Devil, Anne Rice takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genji, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to the Europe of the Black Death and to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction. [via]

    More editions of Servant of the Bones:

  • Singer, Isaac Bashevis: Shosha
    Shosha
    by Isaac Bashevis Singer
    ISBN 0374524807 (0-374-52480-7)
    Softcover, Noonday Pr

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Shosha'
    Book summary:

    "Shosha is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation. Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring Yiddish writer and the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, struggles to be true to his art when faced with the chance at riches and a passport to America. But as he and the rest of the Writers' Club wait in horror for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood love-still living on Krochmalna Street, still mysteriously childlike herself-who has been waiting for him all these years." [via]

    More editions of Shosha:

  • Tyler, Anne: A Slipping-down Life
    A Slipping-down Life
    by Anne Tyler
    ISBN 0345478142 (0-345-47814-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Slipping-down Life'
    Book summary:

    "Without Anne Tyler, American fiction would be an immeasurably bleaker place."
    NEWSDAY
    Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell--and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real....


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

    More editions of A Slipping-down Life:

  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0374521727 (0-374-52172-7)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'
    Book summary:

    Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, this collection captures the mood of 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California. These essays, keynoted by an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, all reflect that, in one way or another, things are falling apart, "the center cannot hold." An incisive look at contemporary American life, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for several decades as a stylistic masterpiece.

    Contents:

    I. LIFE STYLES IN THE GOLDEN LAND
    Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
    John Wayne: A Love Song
    Where the Kissing Never Stops
    Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)
    7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38
    California Dreaming
    Marrying Absurd
    Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    II. PERSONALS
    On Keeping a Notebook
    On Self-Respect
    I Can't Get That Monster out of My Mind
    On Morality
    On Going Home

    III. SEVEN PLACES OF THE MIND
    Notes from a Native Daughter
    Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W
    Rock of Ages
    The Seacoast of Despair
    Guaymas, Sonora
    Los Angeles Notebook
    Goodbye to All That
    [via]

    More editions of Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

  • Speak, Memory
    by Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd
    ISBN 0375405534 (0-375-40553-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Speak, Memory'
    Book summary:

    Even if you already own Nabokov's earthy, otherworldly account of his astounding life, you must buy this 1999 edition. And if you've never read Speak, Memory, you must do so at once. This volume is essential because it includes the unpublished last chapter, a pseudo-review comparing Speak, Memory with another, nonexistent memoir called When Lilacs Last. (That title refers to Whitman's poem on Lincoln's assassination and to the lilacs of Nabokov's childhood home) Chapter 16 is a key to what the imaginary reviewer accurately calls a "unique freak as autobiographies go," revealing its novel-like nature and unifying themes and images (chess, puzzles, spirals, jewels, rainbows, exile, the stained-glass shadow patterns that the future casts on the present). Maybe Nabokov thought he gave too much away, and one sees the formal superiority of ending the book with chapter 15. But the added essay is a gem that dazzles and illuminates.

    You have to consult biographies like Brian Boyd's for the full, remarkable facts of Nabokov's life. A millionaire at 17 (his sister danced in Diaghilev gowns with Fabergé gems at the Winter Palace), repeatedly exiled, forced to bust out of one chrysalis after another into new lives, the writer retained only the infinite wealth of his memory and art. This book is a mosaic shaped by a mind so metaphorical that, as a babe, Nabokov perceived letters as colors, the alphabet as a rainbow.

    The loss of his father is at Speak, Memory's core. This memoir is worth owning for a single paragraph alone, about the sight of Nabokov senior being tossed aloft by grateful peasants he'd been generous to--a dozen or so with locked arms flinging him up in a hip-hip-hooray ritual.

    There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawled in midair.... Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up ... and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
    Nabokov recaptures the paradise of his youth, and acquits himself of the coldness of which some accuse him. He plays literary games, but he plays for keeps. --Tim Appelo [via]

    More editions of Speak, Memory:

  • Grisham, John: The Street Lawyer
    The Street Lawyer
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0375433473 (0-375-43347-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Street Lawyer'

    More editions of The Street Lawyer:

  • A Summons to Memphis
    by Peter Hillsman Taylor
    ISBN 0375701176 (0-375-70117-6)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Summons to Memphis'
    Book summary:

    Peter Taylor is well-known as a masterful writer of short stories set in the old South; not the well-explored South of explosive passions, but an urban world of faded gentility and empty custom. In his almost Jamesian evocations of the mannered upper classes in his native Tennessee, he neither romanticizes nor reviles, but meticulously observes, revealing the patterns of social behavior that leave the individual at the mercy of a relentless past. In this, only the second novel of his long career and the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Taylor weaves a rich social web in telling the story of one family's stark social decline, symbolized by a move from Nashville to Memphis, and of the consequences through the years and down the generations. [via]

    More editions of A Summons to Memphis:

  • A Summons to Memphis
    by Peter Taylor
    ISBN 0345346602 (0-345-34660-2)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Summons to Memphis'
    Book summary:

    Peter Taylor is well-known as a masterful writer of short stories set in the old South; not the well-explored South of explosive passions, but an urban world of faded gentility and empty custom. In his almost Jamesian evocations of the mannered upper classes in his native Tennessee, he neither romanticizes nor reviles, but meticulously observes, revealing the patterns of social behavior that leave the individual at the mercy of a relentless past. In this, only the second novel of his long career and the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Taylor weaves a rich social web in telling the story of one family's stark social decline, symbolized by a move from Nashville to Memphis, and of the consequences through the years and down the generations. [via]

    More editions of A Summons to Memphis:

  • The Tale of the Body Thief
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 034538475X (0-345-38475-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Tale of the Body Thief'
    Book summary:

    It's been said that Vladimir Nabokov's best novels are the ones he wrote after starting a failed novel. Anne Rice wrote The Body Thief, the fourth thrilling episode of her Vampire Chronicles, right after she spent a long time poring over that most romantic of horror novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to research a novel Rice abandoned about an artificial man. Perhaps as a result of Shelley's influence, The Body Thief is far more psychologically penetrating than its predecessors, with a laser-like focus on a single tormented soul. Oh, we meet some wild new characters, and Rice's toothsome vampire-hero Lestat zooms around the globe--as is his magical habit--from Miami to the Gobi desert, but he's in such despair that he trades his immortal body to a con man named Raglan James, who offers him in return two days of strictly mortal bliss.

    Lestat has always had a faulty impulse-control valve, and it gets him in truly intriguing trouble this time. On the plus side, he gets to experience romance with a nun and orange juice--"thick like blood, but full of sweetness." But Lestat is horrified by an uncommon cold, and his toilet training proves traumatic. He's also got to catch Raglan James, who has no intention of giving up his dishonestly acquired new superpowered body. Lestat enlists the help of David Talbot, a mortal in the Talamasca, a secret society of immortal watchers described in Queen of the Damned.

    The swapping of bodies and supernatural stories is choice, and there's even a moral: never give a bloodsucker an even break. --Tim Appelo [via]

    More editions of The Tale of the Body Thief:

  • Douglas, Ann: Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
    Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
    by Ann Douglas
    ISBN 0374524629 (0-374-52462-9)
    Softcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s'
    Book summary:

    A portrait of a generation describes New York's role in the defining of Western economic and political leadership in the years after the first World War and noting its pivotal part in the shaping of American culture. [via]

    More editions of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s:

  • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
    by Jon Krakauer
    ISBN 0375432213 (0-375-43221-3)
    Hardcover, Ballantine Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith'
    Book summary:

    Under the Banner of Heaven is a riveting read. The Lafferty boys were brought up in a squeaky clean All-American family. So what made two of them follow revelations from God to slit the throat of their ex-beauty queen sister-in-law and her infant daughter? The problem was that they got involved in the fundamentalist, survivalist wing of the Mormon Church.

    Author Jon Krakauer expertly jumps from the immediate horror of the Lafferty boys to the context of Mormonism and the wider questions of religious violence. In the process we are taken on a house of horrors ride through the badlands of fundamentalist Mormon religion. Krakauer introduces us to red necks with more than 30 "wives"--many who were "married" in their early teens. It's a story of fraud, child abuse, incest, physical violence and spiritual and emotional rape at a deep level.

    The contemporary story is lurid and shocking, but as Krakauer relates the picaresque story of Joseph Smith--the founder of the Mormon religion--you realise that present day fundamentalist Mormons are far closer to their founder in spirit and behaviour than the more squeaky clean manifestations of modern Mormonism. This well researched and tightly written account gives a great potted history of Mormonism and illuminates the psychotic fringes of religious mentality. In doing so it reveals the wild dangers of spiritual free wheeling and the need for caution and restraint in religion. --Dwight Longenecker [via]

    More editions of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith:

  • The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition
    by Eve Ensler
    ISBN 0375505652 (0-375-50565-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition'
    Book summary:

    "I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy. [via]

    More editions of The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition:

  • The Volcano Lover
    by Susan Sontag
    ISBN 0374285160 (0-374-28516-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Volcano Lover'
    Book summary:

    A romance set in eighteenth-century Naples follows the fortunes of a British ambassador, the ravishing woman he marries, and the young British admiral with whom she falls in love. By the author of The Way We Live Now. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. [via]

    More editions of The Volcano Lover:

  • Vidal, Gore: Washington, D. C.
    Washington, D. C.
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0345342364 (0-345-34236-4)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Washington, D. C.'

    More editions of Washington, D. C.:

  • The West: An Illustrated History
    by Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan
    ISBN 0316735892 (0-316-73589-2)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The West: An Illustrated History'
    Book summary:

    The companion volume to the stunning PBS television series, and an encore the acclaimed bestsellers The Civil War and Baseball. In a vivid narrative that begins with the arrival of the first Europeans and ends well into the twentieth century, author Geoffrey C. Ward provides a gripping journey through the turbulent history of the region that has come to symbolize America around the world. Drawing upon hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship, and vividly illustrated with over 400 photographs, many of them never before published, The West: An Illustrated History chronicles the arrival of wave after wave of newcomers from every direction of the compass, each of which invested the harsh but majestic western landscape with its own myths and desires and dreams.

    It is the central story of America, a story filled with heroism and hope, enterprise and adventure as well as tragedy and disappointment. It explores the tensions between whites and the native peoples that they sought to displace, but it also encompasses the Hispanic experience in the West, from the time of the conquistadors to the transformation of a Mexican-American village called Los Angeles into the region's major metropolis; the lives of Chinese immigrants who called the region "Gold Mountain"; and the ordeals of freed slaves from the South who sought a better life homesteading on the Great Plains. This book is as sprawling, vast, and rich as the history and land it describes. [via]

    More editions of The West: An Illustrated History:

  • Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0375703195 (0-375-70319-5)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade'
    Book summary:

    Something odd, if predictable, became of screenwriter William Goldman after he wrote the touchstone tell-all book on filmmaking, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), he became a Hollywood leper. Goldman opens his long-awaited sequel by writing about his years of exile before he found himself--again--as a valuable writer in Hollywood.

    Fans of the two-time Oscar-winning writer (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men) have anxiously waited for this follow-up since his career serpentined into a variety of big hits and critical bombs in the '80s and '90s. Here Goldman scoops on The Princess Bride (his own favorite), Misery, Maverick, Absolute Power, and others. Goldman's conversational style makes him easy to read for the film novice but meaty enough for the detail-oriented pro. His tendency to ramble into other subjects may be maddening (he suddenly switches from being on set with Eastwood to anecdotes about Newman and Garbo), but we can excuse him because of one fact alone: he is so darn entertaining.

    Like most sequels, Which Lie follows the structure of the original. Both Goldman books have three parts: stories about his movies, a deconstruction of Hollywood (here the focus is on great movie scenes), and a workshop for screenwriters. (The paperback version of the first book also comes with his full-length screenplay of Butch; his collected works are also worth checking out). This final segment is another gift--a toolbox--for the aspiring screenwriter. Goldman takes newspaper clippings and other ideas and asks the reader to diagnose their cinematic possibilities. Goldman also gives us a new screenplay he's written (The Big A), which is analyzed--with brutal honesty--by other top writers. With its juicy facts and valuable sidebars on what makes good screenwriting, this is another entertaining must-read from the man who coined what has to be the most-quoted adage about movie-business success: "Nobody knows anything." --Doug Thomas [via]

    More editions of Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade:

  • The White Album
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0374522219 (0-374-52221-9)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The White Album'
    Book summary:

    First published in 1979, The White Album is a mosaic of the late sixties and seventies. It includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a Balck Panther Party press conference, the story of John Paul Getty's museum, the romance of water in an arid landscape, and the swirl and confusion of the sixties. With commanding sureness of mood and language, Joan Didion exposes the realities and dreams of that age of self-discovery whose spiritual center was California.
    [via]

    More editions of The White Album: