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books tagged “British literature”
books tagged “British literature”
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The African Queenby C. S. ForesterISBN 0316289108 (0-316-28910-8)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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Afterimageby Helen HumphreysISBN 0312420641 (0-312-42064-1)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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All Creatures Great and Smallby James HerriotISBN 0312330855 (0-312-33085-5)
Softcover, Griffin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All Creatures Great and Small'Book summary:"This book shines with humor, pathos, superb tale-telling and a rarity above all these, what seems a richly justified love of life. whether on his back in a much-filled stable with his arm inside a cow, trying to turn a calf into the proper position to be born, or calming a wealty dowager with an overfed Peckingses, or comforting a lonely old man companion -a dog -has died, James Herriot needed all the bedside manner, stamina, skill, and gift of humanity of the best of family doctors. [via]
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And Then There Were Noneby Agatha ChristieISBN 0312330871 (0-312-33087-1)
Softcover, Griffin
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› Find signed collectible books: 'And Then There Were None'Book summary:First there were ten--a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unkonwn to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal--and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion.
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The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballardby J.G. Ballard, Anthony BurgessISBN 0312278446 (0-312-27844-6)
Softcover, Henry Holt & Co
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The BFGby Roald Dahl, Quentin BlakeISBN 0374304696 (0-374-30469-6)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The BFG'Book summary:Evidently not even Roald Dahl could resist the acronym craze of the early eighties. BFG? Bellowing ferret-faced golfer? Backstabbing fairy godmother? Oh, oh ... Big Friendly Giant! This BFG doesn't seem all that F at first as he creeps down a London street, snatches little Sophie out of her bed, and bounds away with her to giant land. And he's not really all that B when compared with his evil, carnivorous brethren, who bully him for being such an oddball runt. After all, he eats only disgusting snozzcumbers, and while the other Gs are snacking on little boys and girls, he's blowing happy dreams in through their windows. What kind of way is that for a G to behave?
The BFG is one of Dahl's most lovable character creations. Whether galloping off with Sophie nestled into the soft skin of his ear to capture dreams as though they were exotic butterflies; speaking his delightful, jumbled, squib-fangled patois; or whizzpopping for the Queen, he leaves an indelible impression of bigheartedness. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]
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Border Crossingby Pat BarkerISBN 0312420196 (0-312-42019-6)
Softcover, Picador USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Border Crossing'Book summary:Out walking with his wife, Lauren, beside the river Tyne, Tom Seymour instinctively risks his life to save a young man who they happen to notice just before he jumps into the icy current. Tom's spontaneous act saves the life of someone whose past, as well as his future, he feels a sense of responsibility towards. Recently released from prison, and living under an assumed name, Danny Miller was tried for murder as a ten-year-old on the basis of Tom's testimony, and assessment of him as a psychologist and an expert witness. When Danny asks Tom to help him sort out his lifebeginning with his pastTom is drawn into a lonely, soul-searching reinvestigation of the child murderer's case.[via] -
Boyby Roald DahlISBN 0374373744 (0-374-37374-4)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Boy'Book summary:"'I am only eight years old,' I told myself. 'No little boy of eight has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.'"
So thought Roald Dahl in 1924 when his plan to get revenge on the mean and disgusting candy-store owner Mrs. Pratchett seemed to have worked all too well. Writing about this and other boyhood adventures, the author has recalled only those that stand out as spectacular. "Some are funny. Some are painful. Some are unpleasant. I suppose that is why I have always remembered them so vividly. All are true."
We are told of his first automobile ride, in which he nearly lost his nose; of the canings by Headmasters and older schoolboys; and of the grisly methods of Matrons, those guardians against misbehavior who supervised the dormitories. There were glorious times, too, with his big family at home in Wales; on holiday each summer on a remote island in Norway; and in the class of an endearing math teacher who thought numbers the dreariest things in the world.
Roald Dahl's adventures and misadventures during his school years are crowded with people as strange and wonderful as any character he has created and are as exciting and full of the unexpected as his celebrated fiction.[via]Boy is a 1985 Boston Globe - Horn Book Awards Honor Book for Nonfiction.More editions of Boy:
Bull from the Seaby Mary RenaultISBN 0375726802 (0-375-72680-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Charlie and the Great Glass Elevatorby Roald Dahl, Quentin BlakeISBN 0375815252 (0-375-81525-2)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator'Book summary:Picking right up where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left off, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator continues the adventures of Charlie Bucket, his family, and Willy Wonka, the eccentric candy maker. As the book begins, our heroes are shooting into the sky in a glass elevator, headed for destinations unknown. What follows is exactly the kind of high-spirited magical madness and mayhem we've all come to expect from Willy Wonka and his creator Roald Dahl. The American space race gets a send-up, as does the President, and Charlie's family gets a second chance at childhood. Throw in the Vermicious Knids, Gnoolies, and Minusland and we once again witness pure genius. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]
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The Chimney Sweeper's Boyby Barbara VineISBN 0375702938 (0-375-70293-8)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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Christmas Holidayby W. Somerset MaughamISBN 0375724613 (0-375-72461-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Christopher and His Kindby Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374520364 (0-374-52036-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939by Christopher IsherwoodISBN 0374312567 (0-374-31256-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939'Book summary:Christopher and His Kind is an intriguing slice of autobiography. It covers ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to sp a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to the beginning of 1939, when he arrived in New York to start a life in the States.[via]
The book revealingly contrasts fact with fiction-the real people Isherwood met in Germany with the portraits of them in his two Berlin novels, who then appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.But one does not need to be familiar with his body of work to appreciate the powerful and compelling story he tells here. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, after Hitler came to power. For the next four years, he wandered around Europe-through Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France-with a German boy named Heinz.
The characters in the book include W.H. Auden, Stephen Sper, and E.M. Forster as well as the literary circles of Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf. Chronicling German refugees and the British colony in Portugal, the Group Theatre company (which performed the three Auden-Isherwood plays) and the film studio where he worked and which he used as the setting for Prater Violet, Christopher and His Kind is an engrossing and powerfully rered portrait of a decade in the life of a major writer.More editions of Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939:
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Citadelby A. J. CroninISBN 0316161837 (0-316-16183-7)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Citadel'Book summary:This thrilling novel of a doctor's life has been the subject of a Mobil Masterpiece Theatre dramatic series on PBS. "Cronin's distinguished achievement. . . . No one could have written as fine, honest, and moving a study of a young doctor as "The Citadel" without possessing great literary taste and skill".--"The Atlantic Monthly". [via]
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The Collectorby John FowlesISBN 0316290238 (0-316-29023-8)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collector'Book summary:Hailed as the first modern psychological thriller, The Collector is the internationally bestselling novel that catapulted John Fowles into the front rank of contemporary novelists. This tale of obsessive love--the story of a lonely clerk who collects butterflies and of the beautiful young art student who is his ultimate quarry--remains unparalleled in its power to startle and mesmerize.[via]More editions of The Collector:
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The Complete Short Storiesby Evelyn Waugh, Ann Pasternak SlaterISBN 0375404309 (0-375-40430-9)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Short Stories'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh's almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism.
The thirty-nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" and "Scott-King's Modern Europe"; an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited; and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing.
This edition contains the original illustrations to "Love Among the Ruins," as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s. [via]More editions of The Complete Short Stories:
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The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donneby John Donne, Charles M. CoffinISBN 0375757341 (0-375-75734-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time." [via]More editions of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne:
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The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waughby Evelyn WaughISBN 0316926604 (0-316-92660-4)
Softcover, Back Bay Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh'Book summary:Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master--the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers--was no less adept when it came to the short form. Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. Wodehouse. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.
The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place:
It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church.... A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning.
Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). In "Compassion," a 1949 tale that belies the author's vaunted anti-Semitism, a mere glimpse of some Yugoslavian partisans leads to this superabundant sentence: "He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels." Nobody can accuse Waugh of squishy sentimentality--remember, romantic prose is strictly for convalescents. Still, The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses. [via]More editions of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh:
Complete Works of Lewis Carrollby John TennielISBN 0370005074 (0-370-00507-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Crow Roadby Iain BanksISBN 0349103232 (0-349-10323-2)
Hardcover, Abacus
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crow Road'Book summary:TV trade edition paperback, fine in specially printed TV dw (fine (as new)) [via]
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The Day of Creationby J.G. BallardISBN 0312421281 (0-312-42128-1)
Softcover, Picador USA
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Desperate Remediesby Thomas HardyISBN 0333177606 (0-333-17760-6)
Hardcover, Macmillan
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Double Visionby Pat BarkerISBN 0312424108 (0-312-42410-8)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Ebony Towerby John FowlesISBN 0316287458 (0-316-28745-8)
Softcover, Time Warner on Demand
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ebony Tower'Book summary:The Ebony Tower, a work every bit as intrigbuing aand dazzling as Fowles has written. It echoes themes from his earlier works. a Tour de Force as yet unrecognized. [via]
Ever Afterby Graham SwiftISBN 0330323318 (0-330-32331-8)
Hardcover, Pan Books
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Fahrenheit 451by Ray BradburyISBN 0345342968 (0-345-34296-8)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fahrenheit 451'Book summary:In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."
Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.
Bradbury--the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man--is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Readers ages 13 to 93 will be swept up in the harrowing suspense of Fahrenheit 451, and no doubt will join the hordes of Bradbury fans worldwide. --Neil Roseman [via]
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Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasureby John Cleland, Gary GautierISBN 0375758089 (0-375-75808-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure'Book summary:Fanny Hill, shrouded in controversy for most of its more than 250-year life, and banned from publication in the United States until 1966, was once considered immoral and without literary merit, even earning its author a jail sentence for obscenity.
The tale of a naïve young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century London who slowly rises to respectability, the noveland its popularityendured many bannings and critics, and today Fanny Hill is considered an important piece of political parody and sexual philosophy on par with French libertine novels.
This uncensored version is set from the 1749 edition and includes commentary by Charles Rembar, the lawyer who defended the novel in the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case, and newly commissioned notes. [via]More editions of Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure:
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Frenchman's Creekby Daphne Du MaurierISBN 038000979X (0-380-00979-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frenchman's Creek'Book summary:"Highly personalized adventure, ultra-romantic mood, and skillful storytelling." New York Times
DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S LOST CLASSIC; AN ELECTRIFYING TALE OF LOVE AND SCANDAL ON THE HIGH SEAS.
Jaded by the numbing politeness of Restoration London, Lady Dona St. Columb revolts against high society. She rides into the countryside, guided only by her restlessness and her longing to escape.
But when chance leads her to meet a French pirate, hidden within Cornwall's shadowy forests, Dona discovers that her passions and thirst for adventure have never been more aroused. Together, they embark upon a quest rife with danger and glory, one which bestows upon Dona the ultimate choice: sacrifice her lover to certain death or risk her own life to save him.
Frenchman's Creek is the breathtaking story of a woman searching for love and adventure who embraces the dangerous life of a fugitive on the seas.
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The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs & Lyrical Poems in the English Languageby Francis Turner PalgraveISBN 0333949536 (0-333-94953-6)
Softcover, Palgrave
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Gormenghastby Mervyn Laurence PeakeISBN 034527699X (0-345-27699-X)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Half a Lifeby V.S. NaipaulISBN 037570728X (0-375-70728-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diaryby Joseph Conrad, Caryl PhillipsISBN 037575377X (0-375-75377-X)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary'Book summary:Introduction by Caryl PhillipsCommentary by H. L. Mencken, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chinua Achebe, and Philip GourevitchOriginally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century's most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad's grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. This edition contains selections from Conrad's Congo Diary of 1890-the first notes, in effect, for the novel, which was composed at the end of that decade. Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad: "His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. . . . He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life." [via]
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Honorary Consulby Graham GreeneISBN 0370014863 (0-370-01486-3)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Honorary Consul'Book summary:When the alcoholic British 'Honorary Consul' in an Argentinian town is kidnapped by a band of revolutionaries, a local doctor negotiates with his captors and with the authorities for the man's release, but the corruption of both soon comes to the fore. From the author of OUR MAN IN HAVANA and THE HUMAN FACTOR. [via]
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The Honourable Schoolboyby John Le CarreISBN 0340220422 (0-340-22042-2)
Hardcover, Hodder and Stoughton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Honourable Schoolboy'Book summary:George Smiley has become acting chief of the Circus, but the credibility of the British Secret Service has been shattered. Smiley's adversary is Karla, the Soviet officer who masterminded the Circus's ruin. His battleground is Hong Kong and his choice of weapons is the Honourable Gerald Westerby. [via]
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The Human Factorby Graham GreeneISBN 0370300432 (0-370-30043-2)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Human Factor'Book summary:From the author of THE COMEDIANS and DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA OR THE BOMB PARTY, a novel in which a leak is traced back to a small sub-section of the SIS, and Maurice Castle decides it is time to retire and live peacefully with his wife. In the VINTAGE CLASSICS series. [via]
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The Iliadby Homer, Robert Fitzgerald, Andrew FordISBN 0374529051 (0-374-52905-1)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Iliad'Book summary:Anger be now your song, immortal one,[via]
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men-carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
-Lines 1-6
Since it was first published more than twenty-five years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of The Iliad are compared. Fitzgerald's work is accessible, ironic, faithful, written in a swift vernacular blank verse that "makes Homer live as never before" (Library Journal).
This edition includes a new foreword by Andrew Ford. 
The Iliad of Homer, Books I-XIIby Homer, Malcolm M. WillcockISBN 0333157389 (0-333-15738-9)
Hardcover, Macmillan Education
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Journal of the Plague Yearby Daniel Defoe, Jason GoodwinISBN 0375757899 (0-375-75789-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Journal of the Plague Year'Book summary:Defoe's account of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665 remains as vivid as it is harrowing. Based on Defoe's own childhood memories and prodigious research, A Journal of the Plague Year walks the line between fiction, history, and reportage. In meticulous and unsentimental detail it renders the daily life of a city under siege; the often gruesome medical precautions and practices of the time; the mass panics of a frightened citizenry; and the solitary travails of Defoe's narrator, a man who decides to remain in the city through it all, chronicling the course of events with an unwavering eye. Defoe's Journal remains perhaps the greatest account of a natural disaster ever written.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the original edition published in 1722. [via]More editions of Journal of the Plague Year:
King Richard II: The Life and Death of King Richard the Second the First Folio of 1623 and a Parallel Modern Editionby William Shakespeare, Richard AdamsISBN 0333176537 (0-333-17653-7)
Hardcover, Macmillan
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King's Generalby Daphne Du MaurierISBN 0380002108 (0-380-00210-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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A Laodicean: A Story of Todayby Thomas HardyISBN 0333177657 (0-333-17765-7)
Hardcover, Trafalgar Square
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Life, the Universe and Everythingby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345391829 (0-345-39182-9)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life, the Universe and Everything'Book summary:The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their headsso they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.
They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vice president of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-president of the galazy; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox.
How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert universal Armageddon and save life as we know itand dont know it! [via]More editions of Life, the Universe and Everything:
Longman Anthology Of British Literature: Romantics To 20th Centuryby William Sharpe, David Damrosch, Heather HendersonISBN 0321106695 (0-321-10669-5)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics And Their Contemporariesby Leigh Edwards, Richard BloorISBN 0321333942 (0-321-33394-2)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporariesby Susan J. Wolfson, Peter Manning, David DamroschISBN 0321105796 (0-321-10579-6)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries'Book summary:Volume 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries of The Longman Anthology of British Literature is a comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged anthology that offers a rich selection of major British authors throughout the Romantic period. The text includes Perspectives, Companion Readings, and "and Its Time" sections which show how major literary writings interrelate with and respond to various social, historical, and cultural events of Great Britain in the Romantic period. With a generous representation of fiction, drama, and poetry, the second edition includes major additions of important works and an expanded illustration program. Fresh and up-to-date introductions and notes are written by an editorial team whose members are all actively engaged in teaching and in current scholarship, and illustrations show both artistic and cultural developments of the period. For those interested in British Literature of the Romantic Period. [via]
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Centuryby David Damrosch, Jennifer Wicke, Kevin J. H. DettmarISBN 032110580X (0-321-10580-X)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century'Book summary:Volume 2C: The 20th Century of The Longman Anthology of British Literature is a comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged anthology that offers a rich selection of major British authors throughout the 20th Century. The anthology includes Perspectives and Companion Readings, which show how major literary writings interrelate with and respond to various social, historical, and cultural events of Great Britain in the 20th Century. With a generous representation of fiction, drama, and poetry, the second edition includes major additions of important works and an expanded illustration program. Fresh and up-to-date introductions and notes are written by an editorial team whose members are all actively engaged in teaching and in current scholarship, and illustrations show both artistic and cultural developments of the period. For those interested in British Literature of the Twentieth Century. [via]
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Centuryby William D. Bowman, Frank M. Chiteji, Megan J. GreeneISBN 0321333969 (0-321-33396-9)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Twentieth Century'Book summary:Volume 2C, The Twentieth Century, of The Longman Anthology of British Literature includes major additions of important works by Carol Ann Duffy, a new contemporary play, and coverage of contemporary British fiction featuring short stories by the well known popular authors of today. New selections by already well represented authors are included, such as Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. [via]
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Ageby Beverly Boals Gilbert, Lina L. OwensISBN 0321333950 (0-321-33395-0)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group
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Lost in a Good Bookby Jasper FfordeISBN 0340733578 (0-340-73357-8)
Softcover, Hodder & Stoughton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost In A Good Book'Book summary:Thursday Next, literary detective and newlywed is back to embark on an adventure that begins, quite literally on her own doorstep. It seems that Landen, her husband of four weeks, actually drowned in an accident when he was two years old. Someone, somewhere, sometime, is responsible. The sinister Goliath Corporation wants its operative Jack Schitt out of the poem in which Thursday trapped him, and it will do almost anything to achieve this - but bribing the ChronoGuard? Is that possible? Having barely caught her breath after The Eyre Affair, Thursday must battle corrupt politicians, try to save the world from extinction, and help the Neanderthals to species self-determination. Mastadon migrations, journeys into Just William, a chance meeting with the Flopsy Bunnies, and violent life-and-death struggles in the summer sales are all part of a greater plan. But whose? and why? [via]
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Love, Etcby Julian BarnesISBN 0375725881 (0-375-72588-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Love, Etc'Book summary:Oliver, Stuart, and Gillian have been friends and lovers. But it's been 10 years since this backbiting trio, which Julian Barnes first introduced in Talking It Over, last met--and a lot has changed. For starters, Oliver has married Gillian, and Stuart, his erstwhile best friend, hates him for it. Not just because Stuart was once married to Gillian, but because he still loves her and has never ceased to regard himself as her savior. Under the guise of repairing old friendships--"all blood under the bridge"--this mild-mannered third wheel insinuates himself into the couple's life by offering advice, providing support, and even giving Oliver a job. Once he's maneuvered his nemesis into a crippling depression, Stuart unveils his master plan.
In Love, Etc. Barnes adopts the same technique he used in the earlier installment, allowing his characters to speak their innermost thoughts and secrets directly to the reader--and just about everybody gets some good lines. (Oliver: "Yes, everything went swimmingly, which is a very peculiar adverb to apply to a social event, considering how most human beings swim.") But the book is also a bewitchingly intimate excursion into betrayal and jealousy. With painstaking detail, Barnes creates a vibrant portrait of a modern love triangle--as funny as it is cruel, as absurd as it is deep. Few contemporary writers can portray Middle England, with all its temptations, so darkly. --Matthew Baylis [via]
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The Mabinogionby Gwyn Jones, Thomas JonesISBN 0375411755 (0-375-41175-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mabinogion'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Preface by John Updike
The 11 stories of The Mabinogion, first assembled on paper in the fourteenth century, reach far back into the earlier oral traditions of Welsh poetry.
Closely linked to the Arthurian legends--King Arthur himself is a character--they summon up a world of mystery and magic that is still evoked by the Welsh landscape they so vividly describe. Mingling fantasy with tales of chivalry, these stories not only prefigure the later medieval romances, but stand on their own as magnificent evocations of a golden age of Celtic civilization.
This translation of The Mabinogion has, since its first appearance in 1949, been recognized as a classic in its own right. It was last revised by Gwyn Jones and his wife, Mair, in 1993. [via]More editions of The Mabinogion:
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The Magusby John FowlesISBN 0316296198 (0-316-29619-8)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magus'Book summary:John Fowless The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, but even almost half a century after its first publication, it continues to create tension and concern, remaining the page-turner that it was when it was first released. [via]
The Man Who Wasn't Thereby Pat BarkerISBN 0345369548 (0-345-36954-8)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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Mostly Harmlessby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345379330 (0-345-37933-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mostly Harmless'Book summary:Douglas Adams is back with the amazing, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, who sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors. Line drawings.
From the Hardcover edition. [via] -
Mr. Midshipman Hornblowerby Cecil Scott ForesterISBN 0316289124 (0-316-28912-4)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr. Midshipman Hornblower'Book summary:Horatio Hornblower was born in C.S. Forester's fertile imagination and became arguably more famous, certainly more personal, than Nelson, Cook and Drake combined. He fought in a dozen major campaigns during the Napoleonic wars, and it was in these pages that we first got a glimmer of just how much Bonaparte was hated, and why.
Forester's genius was not tidy, and so this story, which sets Hornblower on course at age 17, is Forester's sixth book about him, though it should have been the first. LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER, which follows it, carries the intrepid young man another step forward in his career. [via]
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The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Lifeby Charles DarwinISBN 0375751467 (0-375-75146-7)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life'Book summary:Introduction by Edward J. Larson
ÿPerhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific inquiry, The Origin of Species sold out its first printing on the very day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street. Based largely on Darwins experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H. M. S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. This Modern Library edition includes a Foreword by the Pulitzer Prizewinning science historian Edward J. Larson, an introductory historical sketch, and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text. [via]More editions of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life:
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Pavaneby Keith RobertsISBN 0345440919 (0-345-44091-9)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pavane'Book summary:An ever-expanding subgenre of science fiction is devoted to "alternate worlds" or "alternate histories": fiction in which a crucial event goes differently than in the world we know, and history is changed. Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968) is set in a backward 20th century molded by the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and the triumph of a militantly antiscience Catholic Church. This is a classic alternate history, in the same company as such highly regarded novels as L. Sprague De Camp's seminal Lest Darkness Fall (1941), in which a modern man slips back in time and attempts to avert the Dark Ages; Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953), set after the South wins the U.S. Civil War; and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), set after the Germans and Japanese win World War II. Lest Darkness Fall and The Man in the High Castle are justly famous; the other two classics, Bring the Jubilee and Pavane, are less well known, and that is a shame.
One reason for Pavane's relative obscurity among American SF readers might be its British setting and author (the Moore and Dick novels are both set in the U.S., and De Camp, Moore, and Dick were all American). Another reason might be that Pavane is a novel created from interrelated but standalone stories (six "measures," or novelettes, and a coda), and the stories are of varying quality. Most are wise, beautifully written, and intensely visualized, especially the opener, "The Lady Margaret," and the closer, "Corfe Gate"; but "Brother John," the story of the monk-artist who witnesses Inquisition tortures and sparks an anti-Church rebellion, is far less detailed, and sometimes even unclear. Another reason for the novel's obscurity may be that some of the stories/chapters have more of a fantasy feel than is typical of more recent alternate history. Also, the nature of the coda's revelations may put off some readers. Nonetheless, Pavane is an intelligent, powerful, and moving work, deserving of a wide readership. --Cynthia Ward [via]
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The Portrait of a Ladyby Henry James, Pierre A. Walker, Anita BrooknerISBN 0375759190 (0-375-75919-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'Book summary:One of the great heroines of American literature, Isabel Archer, journeys to Europe in order to, as Henry James writes in his 1908 Preface, affront her destiny. James began The Portrait of a Lady without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establishand then protecther independence. But Isabels pursuit of spiritual freedom collapses when she meets the captivating Gilbert Osmond. Jamess formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved, writes Hortense Calisher, make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot. [via]
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The Powerbookby Jeanette WintersonISBN 0375725059 (0-375-72505-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Powerbook'Book summary:While many other novels are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel (or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners) travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris, Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a "language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the best video games, you can choose your location, your character, even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play, but you cannot determine the outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age, moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain. Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The PowerBook is rich with historical allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing, and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will change the world." There will be a virtual rush of Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel Holmes [via]
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Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climateby Nancy MitfordISBN 0375718990 (0-375-71899-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate'Book summary:Few aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love (1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.
Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts:
A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?"
The Pursuit of Love follows the romantic fortunes of Linda Radlett, while Love in a Cold Climate ventures further afield with the story of Polly Hampton's shocking love affair and its unexpectedly funny aftermath. Fanny's inexhaustible narration is a pleasant buffer for Mitford's deft teasing, which dances along just this side of mockery. The author of U and Non-U, a famous tongue-in-cheek treatise on the shibboleths of upper-class mores, Mitford often leaves the reader wondering just where she stands in the class wars, and much of her humor arises in the fine distinctions of aristocratic manners and speech. Still, there's an inimitable tart sweetness to these stories of true love and its pallid imitators, making them perfect snapshots of a vanished world. --Barrie Trinkle [via]More editions of Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate:
Quarantine: A Novelby Jim CraceISBN 0374239622 (0-374-23962-2)
Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
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The Small House at Allingtonby Anthony TrollopeISBN 0375400672 (0-375-40067-2)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Small House at Allington'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) [via]
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fishby Douglas AdamsISBN 0345391837 (0-345-39183-7)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'Book summary:Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange trip through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription, the mysterious disappearance of Earths dolphins, and the discovery of his battered copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy all conspire to give Arthur the sneaking suspicion that something otherworldly is indeed going on.
God only knows what it all means. Fortunately, He left behind a Final Message of explanation. But since its light-years away from Earth, on a star surrounded by souvenir booths, finding out what it is will mean hitching a ride to the far reaches of space aboard a UFO with a giant robot. But what else is new? [via]More editions of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
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The Spy Who Came in from the Coldby John Le CarreISBN 0345377370 (0-345-37737-0)
Softcover, Ballantine Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'Book summary:It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.
Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Sword of Honor a Trilogyby E. WaughISBN 0316925985 (0-316-92598-5)
Hardcover, Little Brown & Co
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Thrones, Dominationsby Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton WalshISBN 0312968302 (0-312-96830-2)
Softcover, St Martins Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Thrones, Dominations'Book summary:Asked by her new husband, the gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey, why she is having trouble writing her latest mystery novel, Harriet Vane explains, "When I needed the money, it justified itself. It was a job of work, and I did it as well as I could, and that was that. But now, you see, it has no necessity except itself. And, of course, it's hard; it's always been hard, and it's getting harder. So when I'm stuck I think, this isn't my livelihood, and it isn't great art, it's only detective stories. You read them and write them for fun." Is this a clue to the mystery of why Dorothy L. Sayers put aside her 13th full-length Lord Peter novel in 1938 and never finished it? She had made lots of money, and was much more interested in translating Dante and writing about religion. Or is it another excellent novelist, Jill Paton Walsh, speculating--in a perfect imitation of Sayers's voice--on what might have happened? Walsh was invited by the estate of Sayers's illegitimate son, Anthony Fleming, to finish Thrones, Dominations. She has done a splendid job, certain to please Sayers loyalists on the "dorothyl" listserv as well as those new to the Wimsey canon. Lord Peter has been made much more human and interesting by marriage; Harriet is a wise and acerbic companion; and the story, about the murders of two beautiful young women involved with a theatrical producer, is full of twists and connivance. There's also a fascinating subplot involving the soon-to-abdicate King Edward VII and a country on the brink of World War II. Earlier Wimseys in paperback include The Five Red Herrings, Gaudy Night, Murder Must Advertise, and Unnatural Death. Books in print by Walsh include a mystery called A Piece of Justice and a novel, The Serpentine Cave. [via]
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Travels With My Auntby Graham GreeneISBN 0370014227 (0-370-01422-7)
Hardcover, Bodley Head
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Troilus and Criseydeby Geoffrey Chaucer, George Philip Krapp, Peter BeidlerISBN 0375757368 (0-375-75736-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Well of Lost Plotsby Jasper FfordeISBN 0340825928 (0-340-82592-8)
Softcover, Hodder & Stoughton
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Well of Lost Plots'Book summary:Leaving Swindon behind her to hide out in the Well of Lost Plots (the place where all fiction is created), Thursday Next, Literary Detective and soon-to-be one parent family, ponders her next move from within an unpublished book of dubious merit entitled 'Caversham Heights'. Landen, her husband, is still eradicated, Aornis Hades is meddling with Thursday's memory, and Miss Havisham - when not sewing up plot-holes in 'Mill on the Floss' - is trying to break the land-speed record on the A409. But something is rotten in the state of Jurisfiction. Perkins is 'accidentally' eaten by the minotaur, and Snell succumbs to the Mispeling Vyrus. As a shadow looms over popular fiction, Thursday must keep her wits about her and discover not only what is going on, but also who she can trust to tell about it ...With grammasites, holesmiths, trainee characters, pagerunners, baby dodos and an adopted home scheduled for demolition, 'The Well of Lost Plots' is at once an addictively exciting adventure and an insight into how books are made, who makes them - and why there is no singular for 'scampi'. In the words of one critic: 'Don't ask. Just read it.' [via]
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A Whistling Womanby A. S. ByattISBN 0375415343 (0-375-41534-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Whistling Woman'Book summary:This electrifying new novel forms the triumphant conclusion to the great Frederica quartet depicting the forces in English life from the early 50s to 1970.
While Frederica -- the spirited heroine of Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower -- falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and those of the people she loves. In the late 1960s the world begins to split. Near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurons and the working of the brain, an anti-university springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Fredericas mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish; people flounder, often comically, to find their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identity.
The focus of these novels first widened from the old nuclear family to the experimental group and now narrows again to reveal the different, modern patterns of intimacy which emerged in these years. Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breath-taking twists of plot, Byatt illuminates the effervescence of the 1960s -- both its excitements and its dangers -- as no one has done before. A Whistling Woman is the ultimate novel of ideas made flesh -- gloriously sensual, sexy and scary, bursting with ideas, contradictions, scientific discoveries, ethical conflicts, sly humour and wonderful humanity. [via]More editions of A Whistling Woman:
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Wise Childrenby Angela CarterISBN 0374291330 (0-374-29133-0)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wise Children'Book summary:Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchoir Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best. [via]
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Zuleika Dobsonby Max BeerbohmISBN 037575248X (0-375-75248-X)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zuleika Dobson'Book summary:Zuleika Dobson is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical," said E. M. Forster. "It is a great work--the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time . . .
so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound."
Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm's sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas Col-
lege, Oxford. A conjurer by profession, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is impervious to her considerable charms: a circumstance that proves fatal, as any number of love-smitten suitors are driven to suicide by the damsel's rejection. Laced with memorable one-liners ("Death cancels all engagements," utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm's rococo imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to Forster, "a beauty unattainable by serious literature."
"I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure," recalled Bertrand Russell. "It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years." [via]More editions of Zuleika Dobson:
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