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books tagged “english literature” (ENGLISH LITERATURE / English literature)
books tagged “english literature”
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All Creatures Great and Smallby Laura KellyISBN 0679872183 (0-679-87218-3)
Softcover, Random House Children's Books
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American Notesby Charles Dickens, Christopher HitchensISBN 0679601856 (0-679-60185-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Notes'Book summary:American Notes is the fascinating travel journal of one of 19th century America's most celebrated tourists--Charles Dickens. A lively chronicle of his five-month trip around the United States in 1842, the book records the author's adventures journeying by steamboat and stagecoach as well as his impressions of everything from schools and prisons to table manners and slavery. [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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The Annotated Shakespeareby William Shakespeare, A. L. RowseISBN 0681322608 (0-681-32260-8)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Press
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Asylumby Patrick McGrathISBN 0679781382 (0-679-78138-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Asylum'Book summary:The New Yorker review praised Patrick McGrath's "ornate, deadpan style . . . distinguished by its unusual seriousness, its lack of camp," and described Asylum as a "layered, implicating book, whose terrors and malignities aren't quite the ones we expect, and are a matter of mood and viewpoint as well as of plot." McGrath's fourth novel (his other three are also highly recommended) features a subtly deceptive narrator whose confident, musical voice seduces you--a voice that mirrors, in its meter, emotions ranging from lyrically obsessed, to meticulously fond, to cautious and stiff with horror. And the imagery is unforgettable: the grim architecture of the asylum; a ravaged human head with empty eye sockets; a drowning in a pool on a barren heath. [via]
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Babel Towerby A. S. ByattISBN 0679736808 (0-679-73680-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Babel Tower'Book summary:Babel Tower follows The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in tracing Frederica Potter, a lover of books who reflects the author's life and times. It centers around two lawsuits: in one, Frederica -- a young intellectual who has married outside her social set -- is challenging her wealthy and violent husband for custody of their child; in the other, an unkempt but charismatic rebel is charged with having written an obscene book, a novel-within-a-novel about a small band of revolutionaries who attempt to set up an ideal community. And in the background, rebellion gains a major toehold in the London of the Sixties, and society will never be the same. [via]
Birdsongby Sebastian FaulksISBN 0679776818 (0-679-77681-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Blue Afternoonby William BoydISBN 067977260X (0-679-77260-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blue Afternoon'Book summary:From the acclaimed author of Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon, a new novel, set in present-day London, which demonstrates the superbly plotted storytelling that has earned William Boyd his reputation as a writer whose "eccentric wit and restless intelligence exert a powerful appeal" (New York Times Book Review).
One cold winter's morning, Lorimer Black--
insurance adjuster, young, good-looking, on the rise--goes out on a perfectly ordinary business appointment, finds a hanged man and realizes that his life is about to be turned upside down. The elements at play: a beautiful actress glimpsed in a passing taxi . . . an odd new business associate whose hiring, firing and rehiring make little sense . . . a rock musician who is losing his mind--and a web of fraud in which virtually everyone Lorimer Black knows has been caught and in which he finds himself increasingly entangled.
Boyd at his urbane and mesmerizing best. [via] -
Cambridgeby Caryl PhillipsISBN 0679736891 (0-679-73689-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cambridge'Book summary:One of England's most widely acclaimed young novelists adopts two eerily convincing narrative voices and juxtaposes their stories to devastating effect in this mesmerizing portrait of slavery. Cambridge is a devoutly Christian slave in the West Indies whose sense of justice is both profound and self-destructive, while Emily is a morally-blind, genteel Englishwoman.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via] 
The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Actsby Percy Bysshe ShelleyISBN 0672603985 (0-672-60398-5)
Softcover, Macmillan Pub Co
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Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part One and Part Twoby Christopher Marlowe, Irving RibnerISBN 0672630613 (0-672-63061-3)
Softcover, Odyssey Press
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Cross Channelby Julian BarnesISBN 067976755X (0-679-76755-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Crossing the Riverby Caryl PhillipsISBN 0679757945 (0-679-75794-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crossing the River'Book summary:In a vastly ambitious and intensely moving novel, the author of Cambridge creates a many-tongued chorus of the African diaspora in the complex and riveting story of a desperate father who sells his three children into slavery. [via]
Dr. Haggard's Diseaseby Patrick McGrathISBN 0679752617 (0-679-75261-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Dyer's Hand and Other Essaysby W. H. AudenISBN 0679724842 (0-679-72484-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Feast of Julyby H.E. BatesISBN 0679765018 (0-679-76501-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Folding Starby Alan HollinghurstISBN 0679436057 (0-679-43605-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Folding Star'Book summary:Obsessed with one of his pupils, teacher Edward Manners becomes embroiled in affairs with two other men, but only after discovering the life and work of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst does he come to understand the implications of obsession. 25,000 first printing. [via]
G.by John BergerISBN 0679736549 (0-679-73654-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Gameby A. S. ByattISBN 0679742565 (0-679-74256-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Game'Book summary:The Game is a lush and disturbing novel portraying a sibling rivalry which compels the reader to reconsider the uses and misuses of imagination. when they were little girls, Cassandra and Julia played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance. Now the sisters are grown, and hostile strangers--until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over, reenters their lives. [via]
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George Eliotby George EliotISBN 0681007788 (0-681-00778-8)
Softcover, Longmeadow Pr
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Ghostwrittenby David MitchellISBN 0679463046 (0-679-46304-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ghostwritten'Book summary:"What is real and what is not?" David Mitchell's Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts plays with precisely this question throughout its elaborately compartmentalized narrative. (That there are 10 chapters in this 9-part invention is just one more aspect of the author's mysterious schema.) With its multitude of voices and globe-girdling locations--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--this first novel offers readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place.
At the heart of Mitchell's book is the global extension of the postmodern city, and the networks (cultural, technological, phantasmagoric) to which it gives rise. A metropolis like Tokyo is quite literally beyond our comprehension:
Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It's long since filled up the plain, and now it's creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date. It's a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one.
At this level, urban sprawl becomes an epistemological condition. On one hand it leads to a Japanese death cult, purging the "unclean" from the city's subway with nerve gas. And on the other, it produces a certain splintering of the human personality. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants Neal, the narrator of the book's second part. "No wonder it's all such a ... mess." He's talking about his life as a Hong Kong trader, a "man of departments, compartments, apartments." But he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau. And while he's labored diligently to solder together the many parts--the aching bodies, the reality police, the impossibly complex machinery of contemporary life--his novel, too, may suffer from an excess of split personality. --Vicky Lebeau [via]More editions of Ghostwritten:
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God of Small Thingsby Arundhati RoyISBN 0679309411 (0-679-30941-1)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'God of Small Things'Book summary:"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. " The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . . Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it. The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic. [via]
Guerrillasby V.S. Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad NaipaulISBN 0679731741 (0-679-73174-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Happy Prince and Other Talesby Oscar Wilde, Charles RobinsonISBN 0679444734 (0-679-44473-4)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales'Book summary:A pleasure seeking prince, a selfish giant, and more: Wilde's fairy tales, first published in 1888, for childlike people from eighteen to eighty." [via]
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Higher Groundby Caryl PhillipsISBN 0679763767 (0-679-76376-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Hopeful Monsters : A Novelby Nicholas MosleyISBN 0679739297 (0-679-73929-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Hopkins: Poems and Proseby Gerard Manley HopkinsISBN 0679444696 (0-679-44469-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Howards Endby E. M. ForsterISBN 0679600698 (0-679-60069-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Human Factorby Graham GreeneISBN 0679409920 (0-679-40992-0)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Human Factor'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Graham Greenes passion for moral complexity and his stylistic aplomb were perfectly suited to the cat-and mouse game of the spy novel, a genre he practically invented and to which he periodically returned while fashioning one of the twentieth centurys longest, most triumphant literary careers. Written late in his life, The Human Factor displays his gift for suspense at its most refined level, and his understanding of the physical and spiritual vulnerability of the individual at its deepest. [via]More editions of The Human Factor:
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In Search of Lost Timeby Marcel ProustISBN 0679600280 (0-679-60028-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Search of Lost Time'Book summary:The Guermantes Way, in this the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchess de Guermantess château near Combray. It also represents the narrators passage into the rarefied social kaleidoscope of the Guermantess Paris salon, an important intellectual playground for Parisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and manners of the Guermantess drawing room. Here he encounters nobles, officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert de Saint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron de Charlus, and the Prince de Borodino.
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 In Search of Lost Time:
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Jack Maggsby Peter CareyISBN 0679760377 (0-679-76037-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Maggs'Book summary:"Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation."
--Thomas Keneally
From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion.
The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.
From this volatile milieu emerges a handful of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that could spell certain ruin. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.
"Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. It's about taking possession--of an inheritance, of another person's soul, of your own destiny--and being taken possession of. Not least, it's the story of one writer's being possessed by another."
--Hermione Lee, The Observer
"Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity."
--Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)
"Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind."
--Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph [via] 
James and the Giant Peachby Roald Dahl, Lane SmithISBN 0679880909 (0-679-88090-9)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'James and the Giant Peach'Book summary:Roald Dahl's classic children's novel is now a motion picture from The Walt Disney Company, and this version of James and the Giant Peach grew out of the making of the movie. Lane Smith, conceptual artist for the film, has given James and company a new and arresting look, much in the style of his many highly regarded books, such as Math Curse and The Stinky Cheeseman. Karey Kirkpatrick, the film's screenwriter, created a text that is true to the spirit of Dahl's original, and deftly pulls young readers into the remarkable story. All in all, it's a peach of a book sure to be the pick of every child's bookshelf! [via]
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Jane Austenby Claire TomalinISBN 0679766766 (0-679-76676-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Austen'Book summary:At her death in 1817, Jane Austen left the world six of the most beloved novels written in Englishbut her shortsighted family destroyed the bulk of her letters; and if she kept any diaries, they did not survive her. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin has filled the gaps in the record, creating a remarkably fresh and convincing portrait of the woman and the writer.
[via]
While most Austen biographers have accepted the assertion of Jane's brother Henry that "My dear Sister's life was not a life of events," Tomalin shows that, on the contrary, Austen's brief life was fraught with upheaval. Tomalin provides detailed and absorbing accounts of Austen's ill-fated love for a young Irishman, her frequent travels and extended visits to London, her close friendship with a worldly cousin whose French husband met his death on the guillotine, her brothers' naval service in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies, and thus shatters the myth of Jane Austen as a sheltered and homebound spinster whose knowledge of the world was limited to the view from a Hampshire village.More editions of Jane Austen:
Jane Austen: A Lifeby Claire TomalinISBN 0679446281 (0-679-44628-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Last of the Mohicansby James Fenimore CooperISBN 0673018156 (0-673-01815-6)
Hardcover, Scott Foresman & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last of the Mohicans'Book summary:The tale of a Mohican brave's struggle to protect two English girls from an evil Huron. Illustrated with maps and drawings depicting the period. [via]
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The Last of the Mohicansby Les Martin, James Fenimore Cooper, Shanno StirnweisISBN 0679847065 (0-679-84706-5)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last of the Mohicans'Book summary:Illus. in black-and-white. This action-packed edition of James Fenimore Cooper's famous adventure brings the wilds of the American frontier and the drama of the French and Indian War to vivid life. [via]
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Last Orders: Library Editionby Graham SwiftISBN 0679766626 (0-679-76662-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Last Orders: Library Edition'Book summary:From the author of Waterland and Ever After, Last Orders is a quiet but dazzling novel about a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. When one of them dies, the survivors drive his ashes from London to a seaside town where they will be scattered, compelling them to take stock in who they are today, who they were before, and the shifting relationships in between. Both funny and moving, this won the Booker Prize in 1996. [via]
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Last Talesby Isak DinesenISBN 0679736409 (0-679-73640-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Little Lord Fauntleroyby Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles E. BrockISBN 0679444742 (0-679-44474-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Little Womenby Louisa May Alcott, Monica KullingISBN 0679861750 (0-679-86175-0)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Women'Book summary:The four March sisters--Meg, Amy, Beth, and feisty Jo--share the joys and sorrows of growing up while their father is away at war. The family is poor in worldly goods, but rich in love and character. [via]
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Little Women, Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amyby Louisa May AlcottISBN 0679436421 (0-679-43642-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Women, Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy'Book summary:Louisa May Alcott's beloved tale about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy is presented in a beautiful Everyman's Library Children's Classics edition. The story of the four sisters' dreams, quarrels, and romances are brought to vivid life in this edition that features full cloth binding in bold, bright colors; silk ribbon marker and headband; two-color illustrated endpapers and illustrations throughout. A brief biography of Alcott is also included. [via]
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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] -
Making History : A Novelby Stephen FryISBN 0679459553 (0-679-45955-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Making History : A Novel'Book summary:Those of us who have already discovered Stephen Fry know him as the brilliant British comedian behind TV series such as Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder, and the author of two enormously funny novels, The Liar and The Hippopotamus. But his new film (in which he plays Oscar Wilde) and his new novel (this one) represent a somewhat alarming departure from his previous work: They're more serious. Though humor is still an essential ingredient of both, Fry's fans are finally getting to witness the emotional depth that this brilliant polymath usually keeps hidden.
In Making History, Fry has bitten off a rather meaty chunk by tackling an at first deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, one would reason--and so an earnest history grad student and an aging German physicist idealistically undertake to bring this about by preventing Adolf's conception. And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours--but in most ways even worse. Fry's experiment in history makes for his most ambitious novel yet, and his most affecting. His first book to be set mostly in America, it is a thriller with a funny streak, a futuristic fantasy based on one of mankind's darkest realities. It is, in every sense, a story of our times. [via]More editions of Making History : A Novel:
Matisse Storiesby A. S. ByattISBN 067976223X (0-679-76223-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matisse Stories'Book summary:These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority.
"Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion."--San Francisco Chronicle
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]-
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)
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Taleby Will SelfISBN 0679750932 (0-679-75093-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the Firstby C. DarwinISBN 0674637526 (0-674-63752-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First'Book summary:It is now fully recognized that the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 brought about a revolution in mans attitude toward life and his own place in the universe. This work is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever published, and a knowledge of it should be part of the intellectual equipment of every educated person. The book remains surprisingly modern in its assertions and is also remarkably accessible to the layman, much more so than recent treatises necessarily encumbered with technical language and professional jargon.
This first edition had a freshness and uncompromising directness that were considerably weakened in later editions, and yet nearly all available reprints of the work are based on the greatly modified sixth edition of 1872. In the only other modern reprinting of the first edition, the pagination was changed, so that it is impossible to give page references to significant passages in the original. Clearly this facsimile reprint of the momentous first edition fills a need for scholars and general readers alike.
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The Origin of Species: Library Editionby Charles Robert DarwinISBN 0679600701 (0-679-60070-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species: Library Edition'Book summary:Voyage with Darwin as he gathers the raw material that ushered in the greatest intellectual revolution in 2,000 years upon the publication of this very book! [via]
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Out of Africaby Isak DinesenISBN 0679600213 (0-679-60021-3)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa'Book summary:In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
The Random House colophon made its debut in February 1927 on the cover of a little pamphlet called "Announcement Number One." Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the company's founders, had acquired the Modern Library from publishers Boni and Liveright two years earlier. One day, their friend the illustrator Rockwell Kent stopped by their office. Cerf later recalled, "Rockwell was sitting at my desk facing Donald, and we were talking about doing a few books on the side, when suddenly I got an inspiration and said, 'I've got the name for our publishing house. We just said we were go-ing to publish a few books on the side at random. Let's call it Random House.' Donald liked the idea, and Rockwell Kent said, 'That's a great name. I'll draw your trademark.' So, sitting at my desk, he took a piece of paper and in five minutes drew Random House, which has been our colophon ever since." Throughout the years, the mission of Random House has remained consistent: to publish books of the highest quality, at random. We are proud to continue this tradition today.
This edition is set from the first American edition of 1937 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]More editions of Out of Africa:
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Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grassby Isak DinesenISBN 0679724753 (0-679-72475-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass'Book summary:With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. [via]
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Rachel Papersby Martin AmisISBN 0679734589 (0-679-73458-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Red Badge of Courageby Stephen CraneISBN 0679732233 (0-679-73223-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red Badge of Courage'Book summary:One of the greatest works of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage gazes fearlessly into the bright hell of war through the eyes of one young soldier, the reluctant Henry Fleming. Written by Stephen Crane at the age of twenty-one, the novel imagines the Civil War's terror and loss with an unblinking vision so modern and revolutionary that, upon publication, critics hailed it as a work of literary genius. Ernest Hemingway declared, "There was no real literature of our Civil War . . . until Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage."
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes the short story "The Veteran," Crane's tale of an aged Civil War soldier looking back at his past. [via]More editions of The Red Badge of Courage:
- The Red Badge of Courage: ISBN 0679783202 (0-679-78320-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc - The Red Badge of Courage: ISBN 0679602968 (0-679-60296-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - The Red Badge of Courage: ISBN 0679600442 (0-679-60044-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - The Red Badge of Courage: ISBN 0679732233 (0-679-73223-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- The Red Badge of Courage: ISBN 0679783202 (0-679-78320-2)
Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpectedby Roald DahlISBN 0679729895 (0-679-72989-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Sanditon and Other Storiesby Jane Austen, Peter WashingtonISBN 0679447199 (0-679-44719-9)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sanditon and Other Stories'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Readers of Jane Austens six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.
Sanditon might have been Austens greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce, as her country-bred heroine, a foolish baronet, a family of hypochondriacs, and a mysterious West Indian heiress collide against the background hum of real-estate development at a seaside resort.
The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman who was raised by a rich aunt and who finds herself shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family.
The novella Lady Susan is a miniature masterpiece, featuring Austens only villainous protagonist. Lady Susans subtle, single-minded, and ruthless pursuit of power makes the reader regret that Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.
The special joy of this collection lies in Austens juveniliatiny novels, the enchantingly funny Love and Freindship, comic fragments, and a (very) partial history of Englandromping miniatures that she wrote in her teens. Their high spirits, hilarity, and control offer delicious proof that Austen was an artist born, not made. [via]More editions of Sanditon and Other Stories:
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Selected Poemsby W. H. Auden, Edward MendelsonISBN 0679724834 (0-679-72483-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Poems'Book summary:This edition presents the original versions of many poems, which Auden revised to conform to his evolving political and literary attitudes later in his career. In this volume, Edward Mendelson has restored the early versions of some thirty poems generally considered to be superior to the later versions, allowing the reader to see the entire range of Auden's work. Selected and edited by Edward Mendelson [via]
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Shameby Salman RushdieISBN 0679722041 (0-679-72204-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Singing Detectiveby Dennis PotterISBN 0679720464 (0-679-72046-4)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Staring at the Sunby J. BarnesISBN 0679748202 (0-679-74820-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Staring at the Sun'Book summary:From the Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides. [via]
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Storiesby Katherine MansfieldISBN 0679733744 (0-679-73374-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Tailor of Panamaby John Le CarreISBN 0679774130 (0-679-77413-0)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tailor of Panama'Book summary:John le Carré, the greatest spy novelist of the Cold War era, continues his post-Cold War quest to define the genre he helped perfect. The classic spy novel was essentially a story of good (England, the United States) vs. evil (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union), in which good more or less prevailed. The Tailor of Panama is something else entirely: a spy novel with no spies in which the bad guys reap most of the rewards. It is also a viciously funny satire. The novel is set in Panama, where a plot is in place to make void the Panama Treaty, which would return control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians in 1999. At the center of events is Harry Pendel, the tailor of the title. Coerced into working for British Intelligence, he concocts out of whole cloth a left-wing movement with the goal of luring the American military to do the dirty work--invade Panama à la 1989 and nullify the treaty. From the characters to the setting, le Carré has succeeded in setting new parameters for an old genre. [via]
Talking It Overby Julian BarnesISBN 0679736875 (0-679-73687-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Talking It over'Book summary:In this powerfully affecting Flaubert's Parrot gives readers a brilliant take on the deceptions that make up the quivering substrata of erotic love. "An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit. . . . It's moving, it's funny, it's frightening . . . fiction at its best."--New York Times Book Review. [via]
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The Virgin in the Gardenby A. S. ByattISBN 0679738290 (0-679-73829-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Virgin in the Garden'Book summary:The Virgin in the Garden is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably. [via]
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The Voyage Outby Virginia Woolf, Michael CunninghamISBN 0679640282 (0-679-64028-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Voyage Out'Book summary:The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out--together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf's beginning as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers.
Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.
Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."
This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging short essay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly." [via]More editions of The Voyage Out:
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The Water Babiesby Charles Kingsley, Jessie Willcox SmithISBN 0681006471 (0-681-00647-1)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Water Babies'Book summary:The adventures of Tom, a sooty little chimney sweep with a great longing to be clean, who is stolen by fairies and turned into a water baby. [via]
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Waterlandby Graham SwiftISBN 0679309373 (0-679-30937-3)
Softcover, Vintage
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waterland'Book summary:Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
"Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times [via] -
Winter's Talesby Isak DinesenISBN 0679743340 (0-679-74334-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winter's Tales'Book summary:In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.
Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born. [via]More editions of Winter's Tales:
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Works of H. G. Wellsby H. G. Wells, Frank MayoISBN 068100729X (0-681-00729-X)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Works of H. G. Wells'Book summary:Thousands of pages of H.G. Wells make up this collection; all his major works are here, as well as dozens of others. An active table of contents makes it easy to find the right work.
Works include:
Ann Veronica
Anticipations
Certain Personal Matters
Conversations with an Uncle
The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
The Crystal Egg
The Door in the Wall and Other Stories
An Englishman Looks at the World
The First Men in the Moon
First and Last Things
Floor Games
The Food of the Gods and How It Came To
God the Invisible King
The History of Mr. Polly
In the Days of the Comet
The Invisible Man
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Kipps
Little Wars
Love and Mr. Lewisham
Mankind in the Making
A Modern Utopia
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
The New Machiavelli
New Worlds for Old
Outline of History
Passionate Friends
The Red Room
The Research Magnificent
The Secret Places of the Heart
The Sleeper Awakes
The Soul of a Bishop
Space and Time
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
The Time Machine
Tono-Bungay
Twelve Stories and a Dream
The War of the Worlds
War and the Future
The War in the Air
What is Coming?
The Wheels of Chance
When the Sleeper Wakes
The World Set Free [via]More editions of Works of H. G. Wells:
The Works of Rudyard Kiplingby Rudyard KiplingISBN 0681103744 (0-681-10374-4)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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