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books tagged “dutch”
books tagged “dutch”
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found Thereby Lewis Carroll, John TennielISBN 0679417958 (0-679-41795-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There'Book summary:That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]
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Amsterdamby Pierre-Yves Mercier, Knopf Guides StaffISBN 0679749144 (0-679-74914-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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And Then There Were Noneby Agatha ChristieISBN 067170608X (0-671-70608-X)
Softcover, Pocket Books
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Anna Kareninaby Leo Tolstoy, Leonard J. Kent, Constance Black Garnett, Nina Nikolaevna BerberovaISBN 067978330X (0-679-78330-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Anna Karenina'Book summary:Some people say Anna Karenina is the single greatest novel ever written, which makes about as much sense to me as trying to determine the world's greatest color. But there is no doubt that Anna Karenina, generally considered Tolstoy's best book, is definitely one ripping great read. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Vronsky. I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that 19th-century Russia doesn't take well to that sort of thing. [via]
More editions of Anna Karenina:
- Anna Karenina: ISBN 0679410007 (0-679-41000-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - Anna Karenina: ISBN 0672523833 (0-672-52383-3)
Hardcover, Bobbs-Merrill Co - Anna Karenina: ISBN 0679600795 (0-679-60079-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group - Anna Karenina: ISBN 067978330X (0-679-78330-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- Anna Karenina: ISBN 0679410007 (0-679-41000-7)
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Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Familyby Miep Gies, Alison Leslie GoldISBN 0671662341 (0-671-66234-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family'Book summary:She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope.
It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne
For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims.
From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty. [via]
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The Annotated Lolitaby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Annotated Lolita'Book summary:In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
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Balkan Ghosts : A Journey Through Historyby Robert D. KaplanISBN 0679749810 (0-679-74981-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Balkan Ghosts : A Journey Through History'Book summary:From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy.
This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans' ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region's history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called "Drac," or "the Devil"; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire. [via]
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The Book of Disquietby Fernando Pessoa, Alfred MacAdamISBN 0679402349 (0-679-40234-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Disquiet'Book summary:The Book of Disquiet is the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa described as a 'semiheteronym' because "his personality is not different from mine, rather a simple mutilation of it." But Soares never completed his book; it was discovered after Pessoa's death, on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk. Nearly fifty years later, The Book of Disquiet was finally published, but because any edition or translation of this work must choose a sequence for its entries, each presents a substantially different text. Alfred Mac Adam's translation has been widely reviewed as the most accurate and vivid in English. [via]
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The Bourne Ultimatumby Robert LudlumISBN 0679400435 (0-679-40043-5)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bourne Ultimatum'Book summary:The world's two deadliest spies in the ultimate showdown. At a small-town carnival two men, each mysteriously summoned by telegram, witness a bizarre killing. The telegrams are signed Jason Bourne. Only they know Bourne's true identity and understand the telegram is really a message from Bourne's mortal enemy, Carlos, known also as the Jackal, the world's deadliest and most elusive terrorist. And furthermore, they know that the Jackal wants: a final confrontation with Bourne. Now David Webb, professor of Oriental studies, husband, and father, must do what he hoped he would never have to do again -- assume the terrible identity of Jason Bourne. His plan is simple: to infiltrate the politically and economically Medusan group and use himself as bait to lure the cunning Jackal into a deadly trap -- a trap from which only one of them will escape. [via]
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The Boy Who Followed Ripleyby Patricia HighsmithISBN 067974567X (0-679-74567-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Brideshead Revisitedby Evelyn Waugh, Frank KermodeISBN 0679423001 (0-679-42300-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brideshead Revisited'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Evelyn Waughs most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waughs familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
The edition reprinted here contains Waughs revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.
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The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Black GarnettISBN 0679601813 (0-679-60181-3)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Brothers Karamozov'Book summary:A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This acclaimed new English version of Dostoevsky's last novel does justice to all its levels of artistry and intention. [via]
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Brothers Karamazovby Richard Pevear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa VolokhonskyISBN 0679410031 (0-679-41003-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brothers Karamazov'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Dostoevskys towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtuesbrilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricalitythat made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskythe definitive version in Englishmagnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevskys masterpiece. [via]More editions of Brothers Karamazov:
The Complete Guide to Pruning and Training Plantsby David JoyceISBN 0671738429 (0-671-73842-9)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Confessions of Zenoby Italo Svevo, Beryl de ZoeteISBN 0679722343 (0-679-72234-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of Zeno'Book summary:The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zeno is, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is not is wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive--and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.
As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.
There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson [via]
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The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terrorby Bernard LewisISBN 0679642811 (0-679-64281-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror'Book summary:After the terrorist attacks of September 11, many Americans yearned to understand why Muslim extremists felt such passionate animosity toward the Western world, particularly the United States. Since that historic attack there have been many books and discussions about this very question, but few of them offer such a readable and relevant response as this excellent offering by renowned historian Bernard Lewis (What Went Wrong?). For modern Westerners, Islam is an especially foreign religion and culture to understand. For instance, Westerners typically dismiss things as unimportant when using the expression "thats history." But for those raised in Muslim households, historyeven ancient historyis just as important (if not more important) as the present. And to better understand the hostilities rooted in this historyone could start with recognizing the long-standing resentment the Islamic community harbors from having its homelands torn apart and re-packaged into random political states by occupying Europeans (Westerners). Or stretch back in time to the brutality of the Crusades. Or go straight to the U.S. political meddling in the region throughout the latter 20th century.
This is not a pity fest for Muslims. Lewis even-handedly explores the sources of Islamic antagonism toward the West while also explaining how a supposedly peace-worshipping religion could be so distorted by violent extremism. He notes that the American way of lifeespecially that of fulfillment through material gain and sexual freedomis a direct threat to Islamic values (which is why night clubsplaces where men and women publicly touch one anotherare targets of bombings). But it is basic Western democracy that especially threatens Islamic extremists, notes Lewis, because within its own community more and more Muslims are coming to value the freedom that political democracy allows. For anyone wanting an intelligent and accessible primer on the Islamic-Western conflict, this is an excellent place to begin. Gail Hudson [via]More editions of The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror:
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Darwin for Beginnersby Jonathan MillerISBN 0679725113 (0-679-72511-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Darwin for Beginners'Book summary:The Beginner Books -- "Their cartoon format and irreverent wit make difficult ideas accessible and entertaining."
-- Newsday
aking us through the upheavals in biological thought which made The Origins of Species possible, Jonathan Miller introduces us to that odd revolutionary, Charles Darwin -- a remarkably timid man who spent most of his life in seclusion; a semi-invalid riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash; yet also the man who finally undermined belief in God's creation. Along the way we meet a fascinating cast of characters: Darwin's scientific predecessors, his contemporaries (including Alfred Russell Wallace, whose anticipation of natural selection forced Darwin to publish), his opponents, and his successors whose work in modern genetics provided necessary modifications to Darwin's own work.
Splendidly illustrated, this clever, witty, highly informative book is the perfect introduction to Darwin's life and thought. [via]More editions of Darwin for Beginners:
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Dead Soulsby Nikolai Gogol, Richard Pevear, Larissa VolokhonskyISBN 0679430229 (0-679-43022-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Souls'Book summary:A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity."
After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.
Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried [via]
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Dead Soulsby Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Richard Pevear, Larissa VolokhonskyISBN 0679776443 (0-679-77644-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Souls'Book summary:A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity."
After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.
Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried [via]
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Dispatchesby Michael HerrISBN 0679735259 (0-679-73525-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dispatches'Book summary:Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic. [via]
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El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivagoby Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Max Hayward, Manya HarariISBN 0679774386 (0-679-77438-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternaks masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.
First published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago was not allowed to appear in the Soviet Union until 1987, twenty-seven years after the authors death.
Translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward [via]More editions of El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago:
The Emperorby Ryszard KapuscinskiISBN 0679722033 (0-679-72203-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Exile and the Kingdomby Albert Camus, Justin O'BrienISBN 067973385X (0-679-73385-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Fairy Talesby H.C. Andersen, W. Heath Robinson, Reginald SpinkISBN 0679417915 (0-679-41791-5)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fairy Tales'Book summary:"The Princess and the Pea, " "The Little Mermaid, " and other great Andersen fairy tales have enchanted children since the first ones appeared in Danish in the 1830s and '40s. Spink's translation into English is widely recognized as the finest, and the new Everyman's Library edition is further graced by the magical pictures made in 1899 by three of Britain's most celebrated illustrators. [via]
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A Family Madnessby Thomas KeneallyISBN 067188512X (0-671-88512-X)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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Fathers and Childrenby Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Avril PymanISBN 0679405364 (0-679-40536-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fathers and Children'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Introduction by John Bayley; Translation by Avril Pyman [via]
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dreamby Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph SteadmanISBN 0679724192 (0-679-72419-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream'Book summary:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the ne plus ultra of Hunter S. Thompson and the whole gonzo clan he spawned. Written in the lurid afterglow of the 1960s, Fear and Loathing is a loosely connected series of mad dashes across the desert, trashed hotel rooms, and goofs on the brutish, naïve, or merely unhip, perpetrated by Thompson and his mammoth Samoan attorney. The pair start out high on a medicine cabinet's worth of elixirs, powders, and pills, and stay that way for 200 pages. They careen through an unsettling landscape of paranoia and alienation, but that doesn't mean the book isn't a riot. Here's a small taste: "By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood."
Though somewhat dated (it appeared serially in Rolling Stone throughout November 1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book of real vitality and Rabelaisian wit. A document of the counterculture after it was well past ripe and deep into rot, the book is a wild ride, a paranoid ramble that is thoroughly exhilarating and worth the trip. No pun intended. [via]
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Editionby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Edition'Book summary:Dr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out. Thank God Thompson was there to explode the myth of "objective" journalism and help pave the way for the pens and voices that followed. [via]
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Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa Peopleby Noel MostertISBN 0679401369 (0-679-40136-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Furyby Salman RushdieISBN 0679783504 (0-679-78350-4)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fury'Book summary:life is fury. Fury-sexual, oedipal, political, magical, brutal- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb." malik solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees london for new york. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in new york at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of america's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. Eat me, america, he prays, and give me peace.but fury is all around him. Cabdrivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green-eyed young blonde in a d'angelo voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world. Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of new york. Not since the bombay of midnight's children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. In his eighth novel, salman rushdie brilliantly entwines moments of anger and frenzy with those of humor, honesty, and intimacy. Fury is, above all, a masterly chronicle of the human condition [via]
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slavesby Ira BerlinISBN 0674016246 (0-674-01624-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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Gloryby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679727248 (0-679-72724-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glory'Book summary:Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919. He succeeds--but at a terrible cost. [via]
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The Laughing Policemanby Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo, Alan BlairISBN 0679742239 (0-679-74223-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Lolitaby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'Book summary:Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via] -
Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann, John E. Woods, Luann WaltherISBN 0679772871 (0-679-77287-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Magic Mountain'Book summary:A vast intellectual drama of the forces that play upon modern man, The Magic Mountain is set in a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps--a community organized with exclusive reference to ill health, and a symbol of the diseased society of Europe before 1914. [via]
More editions of Magic Mountain:
- Magic Mountain: ISBN 067973645X (0-679-73645-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc - The Magic Mountain: ISBN 0679441832 (0-679-44183-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group - The Magic Mountain: ISBN 0679600418 (0-679-60041-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group - Magic Mountain: ISBN 0679772871 (0-679-77287-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
- Magic Mountain: ISBN 067973645X (0-679-73645-X)
The Man on the Balconyby Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo, Alan BlairISBN 0679745963 (0-679-74596-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Man Who Went Up in Smokeby Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo, Joan TateISBN 0679745971 (0-679-74597-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Went Up in Smoke'Book summary:His holiday has just begun: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbor gets a phone call, Martin Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths--and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry. [via]
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Moby Dick Or, the Whaleby Herman Melville, Rockwell KentISBN 067978327X (0-679-78327-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moby Dick Or, the Whale'Book summary:Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]
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Moby-Dickby Herman Melville, Larzer ZiffISBN 0679405593 (0-679-40559-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moby-Dick'Book summary:Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]
More editions of Moby-Dick:
- Moby Dick: ISBN 0671836706 (0-671-83670-6)
Softcover, Pocket Books - Moby-Dick: ISBN 0679725253 (0-679-72525-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group - Moby-Dick: ISBN 0679602909 (0-679-60290-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group - Moby-Dick: ISBN 0679405593 (0-679-40559-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Moby Dick: ISBN 0671836706 (0-671-83670-6)
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The Odysseyby Homer, A.T. Murray, George E. DimockISBN 0674995619 (0-674-99561-9)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Odyssey'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, the Homeric saga of the shipwrecks, wanderings, and homecoming of the master tactician Odysseus encompasses a virtual inventory of the themes and attitudes that have shaped Western culture. The tale of Odysseuss encounters with such obstacles as Calypso, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the lotus-eaters, and his dramatic return to Ithaca and his patient wife, Penelope, forms a prototype for all subsequent Western epics.
Robert Fitzgeralds much-acclaimed translation, fully possessing as it does the body and spirit of the original, has helped to assure the continuing vitality of Europes most influential work of poetry. This edition includes twenty-five new line drawings by Barnaby Fitzgerald. [via]More editions of The Odyssey:
The Odyssey of Homerby HomerusISBN 0672614154 (0-672-61415-4)
Hardcover, Bobbs-Merrill Co
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Of Love and Other Demonsby Gabriel García MárquezISBN 0679762841 (0-679-76284-1)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Of Love and Other Demons'Book summary:From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera comes an extraordinary reading experience, the story of a doomed love affair between a twelve-year-old girl and a bookish priest, three times her age, who's been sent to oversee her exorcism. [via]
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Oliver Twistby Charles DickensISBN 0679417249 (0-679-41724-9)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oliver Twist'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickenss great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creationthrough the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikesof the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its authors most loved works.
This edition reprints the original Everymans introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.
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Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813by Simon SchamaISBN 0679729496 (0-679-72949-6)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Pigeonby Patrick Suskind, John E. WoodsISBN 067166770X (0-671-66770-X)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Pninby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'Book summary:Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. [via]
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The Readerby Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown JanewayISBN 0679781307 (0-679-78130-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Red and the Blackby Stendhal, Burton Raffel, Diane JohnsonISBN 0679642846 (0-679-64284-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red and the Black'Book summary:A Major New Translation
The Red and the Black, Stendhals masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorels quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of postNapoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature.
Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the worlds great books, and Burton Raffels extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before. [via]More editions of The Red and the Black:
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The Red and the Black : A Chronicle of 1830by Stendhal, C. K. Scott-MoncrieffISBN 0679601627 (0-679-60162-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red and the Black : A Chronicle of 1830'Book summary:A Major New Translation
The Red and the Black, Stendhals masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorels quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of postNapoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature.
Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the worlds great books, and Burton Raffels extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before. [via]More editions of The Red and the Black : A Chronicle of 1830:
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Rimbaudby Arthur RimbaudISBN 067943321X (0-679-43321-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rimbaud'Book summary:The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Rimbaud contains selections from Rimbaud's work, including over 100 poems, selected prose, "Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871," and an index of first lines. [via]
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Ripley under Groundby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0679742301 (0-679-74230-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ripley under Ground'Book summary:In this harrowing illumination of the psychotic mind, the enviable Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But such a gracious life has not come easily. One inopportune inquiry, one inconvenient friend, and Ripley's world will come tumbling down--unless he takes decisive steps. In a mesmerizing novel that coolly subverts all traditional notions of literary justice, Ripley enthralls us even as we watch him perform acts of pure and unspeakable evil. [via]
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Ripley under Waterby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0679748091 (0-679-74809-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Ripley's Gameby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0679745688 (0-679-74568-8)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ripley's Game'Book summary:Connoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course-- just a chain of events that may lead to it. [via]
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Scarlet and Black : A Chronicle of 1830by Stendhal, Jonathan Keates, C. K. Scott-MoncrieffISBN 0679405658 (0-679-40565-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Scarlet and Black : A Chronicle of 1830'Book summary:Through the stifling society in which wealth and rank triumph over merit moves the impoverished tutor, Julien Sorel. Handsome, sensitive and proud, his shy manner belies a driving ambition to escape the provincial town of Verrieres and forge a way into the drawing-rooms of the Parisian nobility. [via]
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The Second Sexby H.M. Parshley, Simone De BeauvoirISBN 0679420169 (0-679-42016-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second Sex'Book summary:In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement. [via]
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The Second Sexby Simone De Beauvoir, H.M. ParshleyISBN 0679724516 (0-679-72451-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second Sex'Book summary:In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement. [via]
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The Sorrows of Young Wertherby Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Burton PikeISBN 0679643087 (0-679-64308-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'Book summary:A Major New Translation
For more than two centuries the very title of this book has evoked the sensitivity of youth, the suffering of the artist, the idea of a hero too full of love to live. When it was first published in Germany, in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther created a sensation. Banned and condemned but embracedespecially by the youngit has continued to captivate.
Now Burton Pikes startlingly new translation expresses as never before all the anguish, ideas, and ardor of this seminal, iconic novel. And his Introduction reveals both Goethes inspirations and his influenceon works ranging from Madame Bovary to Frankenstein and beyond.
Here is the classic story of Werther, a young man seeking the infinite in an art he cannot master and a woman he cannot havethe prototype of the Romantic hero in a work that anticipated the Romantic Age. Here is a bold new look at a masterpiece that has changed lives and, like its beloved hero, will never grow old. [via]More editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther:
The Sorrows of Young Wertherby W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Mayer, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Louise BoganISBN 0679729518 (0-679-72951-8)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novellaby Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, W. H. AudenISBN 0679600647 (0-679-60064-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Teach Yourself Danishby H. A. KoefoedISBN 0679102124 (0-679-10212-4)
Hardcover, Random House Information Group
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A Tidewater Morningby William StyronISBN 0679754490 (0-679-75449-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Tidewater Morning'Book summary:In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism. [via]
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A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youthby William StyronISBN 0679427422 (0-679-42742-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Tin Drumby Gunter Grass, Ralph ManheimISBN 067972575X (0-679-72575-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tin Drum'Book summary:Meet Oskar Matzerath, "the eternal three-year-old drummer." On the morning of his third birthday, dressed in a striped pullover and patent leather shoes, and clutching his drumsticks and his new tin drum, young Oskar makes an irrevocable decision: "It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer; that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire." Here is a Peter Pan story with a vengeance. But instead of Never-Never Land, Günter Grass gives us Danzig, a contested city on the Polish-German border; instead of Captain Hook and his pirates, we have the Nazis. And in place of Peter himself is Oskar, a twisted puer aeternis with a scream that can shatter glass and a drum rather than a shadow. First published in 1959, The Tin Drum's depiction of the Nazi era created a furor in Germany, for the world of Grass's making is rife with corrupt politicians and brutal grocers in brown shirts:
There was once a grocer who closed his store one day in November, because something was doing in town; taking his son Oskar by the hand, he boarded a Number 5 streetcar and rode to the Langasser Gate, because there as in Zoppot and Langfuhr the synagogue was on fire. The synagogue had almost burned down and the firemen were looking on, taking care that the flames should not spread to other buildings. Outside the wrecked synagogue, men in uniform and others in civilian clothes piled up books, ritual objects, and strange kinds of cloth. The mound was set on fire and the grocer took advantage of the opportunity to warm his fingers and his feelings over the public blaze.
As Oskar grows older (though not taller), portents of war transform into the thing itself. Danzig is the first casualty when, in the summer of 1939, residents turn against each other in a pitched battle between Poles and Germans. In the years that follow, Oskar goes from one picaresque adventure to the next--he joins a troupe of traveling musicians; he becomes the leader of a group of anarchists; he falls in love; he becomes a recording artist--until some time after the war, he is convicted of murder and confined to a mental hospital.The Tin Drum uses savage comedy and a stiff dose of magical realism to capture not only the madness of war, but also the black cancer at the heart of humanity that allows such degradations to occur. Grass wields his humor like a knife--yes, he'll make you laugh, but he'll make you bleed, as well. There have been many novels written about World War II, but only a handful can truly be called great; The Tin Drum, without a doubt, is one. --Alix Wilber [via]
The Ultimate Dog Bookby David TaylorISBN 0671709887 (0-671-70988-7)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Uncle Tom's Cabinby Harriet Beecher StoweISBN 0679443657 (0-679-44365-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'Book summary:Uncle Tom's Cabin is an American classic written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the few options open to nineteenth-century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of pre-Civil War Americans. An overtly moralistic work of unabashed propaganda, it is an attempt to make whites North and South see slaves as mothers, fathers, and children as human beings. Her basic question remains penetrating even today: Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? Uncle Tom's Cabin is an American classic that every American should read. [via]
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War and Peaceby Leo Tolstoy, Louise Maude, Aylmer MaudeISBN 0679405739 (0-679-40573-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'War and Peace'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Three-Volume Boxed Set [via] -
The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up!by Jonathan CoeISBN 0679754059 (0-679-75405-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Winshaw Legacy or What a Carve Up!'Book summary:'I could recommend The Winshaw Legacy as I a superb political novel, or as a fiendishly clever meta-novel, or as a unique modern historical novel, or as a riveting family saga, but I'm afraid that would drive everyone, yawning in terror, straight out of the bookstore. So let's just say it has naked pictures of Natasha Richardson...Can't say that? Well, let's say it's a nasty farce with lots of bathroom humor and violence which reminds me at least as much of Fawlty Towers as it does of Midnight's Children.'
-- Jay McInerney
A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious eighties, a macabre Gothic -- all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic entertainment.
The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.' Bankers, industrialists, politicians, arms dealers and media barons -- they rule Britannia, more or less. They also have a guilty secret in the shape of a mad aunt stashed away in a remote asylum, convinced of familial treachery during World War II and determined to effect the ruin of her entire clan.
In the summer of 1990, while Saddam Hussein is provoking yet another war, the Winshaws' biographer (a severely depressed young novelist) is piecing together the truth of their sordid legacy, and discovers that it converges bizarrely with the plot of a film he's been obsessed by since childhood. Moreover, it seems that all of this, dynasty and cinema alike, has some mysterious connection with his own troubled history. Of course whether he -- or anybody else -- will be alive when this compound riddle is solved remains to be seen.
Savagely funny, hugely inventive and passionately political. The Winshaw Legacy assumes Dickensian proportions as it excoriates the modern age of greed -- and heralds the American debut of an extraordinary writer. As The Economist concluded: Talented comic novelists are rare [but] that exclusive club -- Thomas Love Peacock, Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse are among its members -- has admitted a newcomer, an Englishman called Jonathan Coe.'
'A remarkable achievement; intelligent, funny, and important.' -- The Times Literary Supplement
'An extravagant literary blockbuster...A grand and intelligent novel, so full of accomplishment and pleasure.' -- New Statesman & Society'
Really, something to get excited about...his big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving treat of a novel.' -- The Guardian [via]More editions of The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up!:
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Within a Budding Groveby Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence KilmartinISBN 067960006X (0-679-60006-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Within a Budding Grove'Book summary:First published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swanns Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swanns daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attentionAlbertine, a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]More editions of Within a Budding Grove:
Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Livesby Natalie Zemon DavisISBN 0674955218 (0-674-95521-8)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives'Book summary:As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women--one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant--left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.
All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands. Drawing on Glikl's memoirs, Marie's autobiography and correspondence, and Maria's writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time--childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature--and in relation to men.
The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.
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