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› Find signed collectible books: '1984'
Orwell's classic novel tells the story of a world where thoughts and actions are controlled by the all-seeing Big Brother. When Winston Smith rebels and searches for the truth he learns a painful lesson about his world and the people in it. Also a powerful film directed by Michael Radford. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Absalom, Absalom!'
First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkners ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt young Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his family legacy and that of the Old South. Faulkners novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed, noted Malcolm Cowley. Absalom, Absalom! is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha seriesand it gains power in retrospect. This edition follows the text of Absalom, Absalom! as corrected in 1986 under the direction of Faulkner expert Noel Polk and features a new Foreword by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Birdsong'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Blue & Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations'
These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable therefore to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'
Contains:
Breakfast at Tiffany's
House of Flowers
A Diamond Guitar
A Christmas Memory [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories'
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm.
This volume also includes three of Capote's best-known stories, House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory, which the Saturday Review called one of the most moving stories in our language. It is a tale of two innocentsa small boy and the old woman who is his best friendwhose sweetness contains a hard, sharp kernel of truth.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
Political satire doesn't age well, but occasionally a diatribe contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book. Penned by that Renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Candide is steeped in the political and philosophical controversies of the 1750s. But for the general reader, the novel's driving principle is clear enough: the idea (endemic in Voltaire's day) that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and apparent folly, misery and strife are actually harbingers of a greater good we cannot perceive, is hogwash.
Telling the tale of the good-natured but star-crossed Candide (think Mr. Magoo armed with deadly force), as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Lady Cunegonde, the novel smashes such ill-conceived optimism to splinters. Candide's tutor, Dr. Pangloss, is steadfast in his philosophical good cheer, in the face of more and more fantastic misfortune; Candide's other companions always supply good sense in the nick of time. Still, as he demolishes optimism, Voltaire pays tribute to human resilience, and in doing so gives the book a pleasant indomitability common to farce. Says one character, a princess turned one-buttocked hag by unkind Fate: "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"--Michael Gerber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide : Or, Optimism'
In this splendid new translation of Voltaires satiric masterpiece, all the celebrated wit, irony, and trenchant social commentary of one of the great works of the Enlightenment is restored and refreshed.
Voltaire may have cast a jaundiced eye on eighteenth-century Europea place that was definitely not the best of all possible worlds. But amid its decadent society, despotic rulers, civil and religious wars, and other ills, Voltaire found a mother lode of comic material. And this is why Peter Constantines thoughtful translation is such a pleasure, presenting all the books subtlety and ribald joys precisely as Voltaire had intended.
The globe-trotting misadventures of the youthful Candide; his tutor, Dr. Pangloss; Martin, and the exceptionally trouble-prone object of Candides affections, Cunégonde, as they brave exile, destitution, cannibals, and numerous deprivation, provoke both belly laughs and deep contemplation about the roles of hope and suffering in human life.
The transformation of Candides outlook from panglossian optimism to realism neatly lays out Voltaires philosophythat even in Utopia, life is less about happiness than survivalbut not before providing us with one of literatures great and rare pleasures. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Catcher in the Rye'
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Clockwork Orange'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dead Father'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Diagnosis'
In the bravura opening chapter of Alan Lightman's novel The Diagnosis, a nameless horror befalls Boston businessman Bill Chalmers in the hubbub of his morning commute. As he jostles his way aboard the train and makes cell-phone calls to check last-minute details on his morning meeting (for Bill is punctilious), a realization surfaces in his brain, "like a trapped bubble of air rising from the bottom of a deep pond." He has forgotten where he's going. All he can remember is his anxious urgency and his company's creed, "The maximum information in the minimum time." Acutely aware that he's got a 9:15 appointment, but recalling only the first six digits of his phone number, Bill helplessly gazes out the window. "Trees flew by like flailing arms.... Railroad tracks fluttered by like matchsticks. Trees, white and gray clapboard houses with paint peeling off, junkyards with stacks of flaccid tires." Lightman's Kafka pastiche is as pitch perfect as his verbal music: note the rhyming x sounds in stacks and flaccid (which is not pronounced "flassid").
Terrifyingly soon, Bill is mad, homeless, beaten, and experimented on by comically evil doctors. He recovers and reunites with his family, but inexorably, mysterious paralysis ensues. Doctors try to diagnose him. Coworkers offer empty condolences and plot to steal his fast-track job. His wife seeks consolation with a passionate virtual lover on the Internet, a professor she's never met in the flesh. His teenage son triumphantly hacks into AOL's Plato Online, and Bill's last days are counterpointed with the trial of Socrates and his troubled, rich inquisitor Anytus. Instead of the real story, we get a second shimmering Lightman fable. Anytus's strife with his rebel son, a Socrates supporter, parallels Bill's grief as his son is distanced from him by illness.
Though I felt glimmerings of understanding from time to time, I never did fully figure out exactly what the Socrates story and Bill's decline have to say about each other, nor what Bill's paralysis says about modern times. I implore a smarter reader to explain it to me in the customer comments below. But I can tell you that every character is resonant, and every sensory particular is exquisitely precise, as in Lightman's biggest hit, the Italo Calvino pastiche Einstein's Dreams. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dice Man'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Leiden Des Jungen Werthers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'
What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over 200 years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently not much; until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, sets out to prove the fundamental interconnectedness of all things by solving a mysterious murder, assisting a mysterious professor, unravelling a mysterious mystery, and eating a lot of pizza -- not to mention saving the entire human race from extinction along the way (at no extra charge). To find out more, read this book (better still, buy it, then read it) -- or contact Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. 'A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy epic.' The author [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Existence a New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Freedom Evolves'
Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience.
In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies.
As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Future of the Race'
In a ground-breaking collaboration, and taking the great W.E.B. Du Bois as their model, two of our foremost African-American intellectual address the dreams, fears, aspirations, and responsibilities of the black community--especially the black elite--on the eve of the twenty-first century. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'George Orwell's 1984'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gravity's Rainbow'
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.
Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.
That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.
Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness And the Secret Sharer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heidegger: A Critical Reader'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History and Existential Theology: The Role of History in the Thought of Rudolf Bultmann'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History and the Dialectic of Violence: An Analysis of Sartre's Critique De La Raison Dialectique'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism'
History of Christian Thought, A: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic, by Tillich, Paul; ed. by Carl E. Braaten. 16th ptg. 8vo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The imaginative Calvin and his pet stuffed tiger, Hobbes, take part in death-defying battles with aliens, meditate on the meaning of life, terrorize little Susie, and question parental authority. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jean-Paul Sartre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kangaroo Notebook'
In the last novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan's most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts, an ailment that repulses his doctor but provides the patient with the unusual ability to snack on himself. In short order, Kobo Abe's unraveling protagonist finds himself hurtling in a hospital bed to the very shores of hell. Abe has assembled a cast of oddities into a coherent novel, one imbued with unexpected meaning. Translated from the Japanese by Maryellen Toman Mori.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kitchen'
Two stories, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow," told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary young Japanese women, deal with the themes of mothers, love, transsexuality, kitchens, and tragedy. Reprint. NYT. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'
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]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Loser'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magus'
The Magus was originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later. The story of Nicholas Urfe and his friendship with a demonic millionaire which leads to an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps, The Magus endures as the most enigmatic and magical novel in the Fowles canon, a work rich in symbols, conundrums, and labyrinthine twists of events. This Modern Library edition includes a new introduction by the author. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Martin Heidegger on Being Human: An Introduction to Sein Und Zeit'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Meaning of Anxiety'
When this important work was originally published in 1950--the first book in this country on anxiety--it was hailed as a work ahead of its time.
In the revised edition of this now-classic study, the distinguished author of Love and Will deepens his exploration into anxiety theory. Dr. May challenges the idea that mental health means living without anxiety, and he explores anxiety's potential for self-realization as well as ways to avoid its destructive aspects.More editions of The Meaning of Anxiety:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Moby Dick'
Herman Melville's peerless allegorical masterpiece is the epic saga of the fanatical Captain Ahab, who swears vengeance on the mammoth white whale that has crippled him. Often considered to be the Great American Novel, Moby-Dick is at once a starkly realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure, and a searing drama of heroic courage, moral conflict, and mad obsession. It is world-renowned as the greatest sea story ever told.
Moby-Dick, widely misunderstood in its own time, has since become an indubitable classic of American literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moby Dick Or, the Whale'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monarch Notes on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mostly Harmless'
Douglas Adams is back with the amazing, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, who sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors. Line drawings.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr. Sammler's Planet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nine Stories'
In the J.D. Salinger benchmark "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beach mate Sybil on a raft and tells her about these creatures' tragic flaw. Though they seem normal, if one swims into a hole filled with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat to escape. Meanwhile, Seymour's wife, Muriel, is back at their Florida hotel, assuring her mother not to worry--Seymour hasn't lost control. Mention of a book he sent her from Germany and several references to his psychiatrist lead the reader to believe that World War II has undone him.
The war hangs over these wry stories of loss and occasionally unsuppressed rage. Salinger's children are fragile, odd, hypersmart, whereas his grown-ups (even the materially content) seem beaten down by circumstances--some neurasthenic, others (often female) deeply unsympathetic. The greatest piece in this disturbing book may be "The Laughing Man," which starts out as a man's recollection of the pleasures of storytelling and ends with the intersection between adult need and childish innocence. The narrator remembers how, at nine, he and his fellow Comanches would be picked up each afternoon by the Chief--a Staten Island law student paid to keep them busy. At the end of each day, the Chief winds them down with the saga of a hideously deformed, gentle, world-class criminal. With his stalwart companions, which include "a glib timber wolf" and "a lovable dwarf," the Laughing Man regularly crosses the Paris-China border in order to avoid capture by "the internationally famous detective" Marcel Dufarge and his daughter, "an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite." The masked hero's luck comes to an end on the same day that things go awry between the Chief and his girlfriend, hardly a coincidence. "A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief's bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone's poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go straight to bed." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed George Orwell as one of the twentieth centurys greatest mythmakers. While the totalitarian system that provoked him into writing it has since passed into oblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. In Winston Smiths desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universal predicament of the individual. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Certainty'
Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Philosophical Investigations'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, With a Revised English Translation'
The Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) present his own distillation of two decades of intense work on the philosophies of mind, language and meaning. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation'
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations presents his own distillation of two decades of intense work on the philosophies of mind, language and meaning. When first published in 1953, it immediately entered the center of philosophical debate, and achieved a classic status it has retained ever since. This revised German-English edition is published on the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death. It incorporates final revisions by G. E. M. Anscombe (1919 - 2001) to her original English translation. No distribution rights for this book is available outside the USA and North America. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Philosophical Investigations/Philosophische Untersuchungen'
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations -- one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth-century. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Preliminary Studies for the 'Philosophical Investigations': Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Querelle of Brest'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rabbit Angstrom'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Raise High the Roof beam, Carpenters And Seymour: An Introduction'
The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Rebel Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Two survivors of the Earth's destruction search for the meaning of the universe in this clever science fiction parody. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sartre: A Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sincerity and Authenticity'
"Now and then," writes Lionel Triling "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illustrations'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Reluctant galactic wanderer Arthur Dent finds himself back on Earth, which has been restored after having been demolished for a hyperspace bypass, and again sets out on his travels with a girl who went mad at the Earth's destruction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'
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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sportswriter'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Suttree'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Teach Yourself 101 Key Ideas Existentialism'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tropic of Cancer'
No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walden'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
By virtue of its casual, off-handedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreaus account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts is one of the signposts by which the modern mind has located itself in an increasingly bewildering world. Deeply sane, invigorating in its awareness of humanitys place in the moral and natural order, Walden represents the progressive spirit of nineteenth-century America at its eloquent best. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'War And Peace'
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Three-Volume Boxed Set [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waves'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places'
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian
For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Noise'
Something is amiss in a small college town in Middle America. Something subliminal, something omnipresent, something hard to put your finger on. For example, teachers and students at the grade school are falling mysteriously ill:
Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the fabric of things.J.A.K. Gladney, world-renowned as the living center, the absolute font, of Hitler Studies in North America in the mid-1980s, describes the malaise affecting his town in a superbly ironic and detached manner. But even he fails to mask his disquiet. There is menace in the air, and ultimately it is made manifest: a poisonous cloud--an "airborne toxic event"--unleashed by an industrial accident floats over the town, requiring evacuation. In the aftermath, as the residents adjust to new and blazingly brilliant sunsets, Gladney and his family must confront their own poses, night terrors, self-deceptions, and secrets.
DeLillo is at his dark, hilarious best in this 1985 National Book Award winner, a novel that preceded but anticipated the explosion of the Internet, tabloid television, and the dialed-in, wired-up, endlessly accelerated tenor of the culture we live in. He doesn't just describe life in a hypermediated society, he re-creates it. His characters repeat phrases, information, and rumor gleaned from television, radio, and other media sources like people speaking in code. And DeLillo has seeded the book with short gemlike episodes that demand to be read aloud, and that haunt the imagination years after their first reading: a visit to the Most Photographed Barn in America. A plane that nearly falls out of the sky. An hour in a classroom, canonizing Elvis. These vignettes are vivid and unique, yet, like the phrases from television shows that interject themselves, out of context, into Gladney's consciousness, they are strangely unconnected to one another--reflections of the lives DeLillo is showing us we lead. --Jan Bultmann [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wit: A Play'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zettel'
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