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› Find signed collectible books: 'Almost French: A New Life in Paris'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Almost French: Love And A New Life In Paris'
The charming true story of a spirited young woman who finds adventure--and the love of her life--in Paris.
"This isn't like me. I'm not the sort of girl who crosses continents to meet up with a man she hardly knows. Paris hadn't even been part of my travel plan..."
A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor. Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frédéric together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decided to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite for vichyssoise, the feisty Sydney journalist does her best to fit in, although her conversation, her laugh, and even her wardrobe advertise her foreigner status.
But as she navigates the highs and lows of this strange new world, from life in a bustling quatier and surviving Parisian dinner parties to covering the haute couture fashion shows and discovering the hard way the paradoxes of France today, little by little Sarah falls under its spell: maddening, mysterious, and charged with that French specialty-séduction.
An entertaining tale of being a fish out of water, Almost French is an enthralling read as Sarah Turnbull leads us on a magical tour of this seductive place-and culture-that has captured her heart. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beach'
In our ever-shrinking world, where popular Western culture seems to have infected every nation on the planet, it is hard to find even a small niche of unspoiled land--forget searching for pristine islands or continents. This is the situation in Alex Garland's debut novel, The Beach. Human progress has reduced Eden to a secret little beach near Thailand. In the tradition of grand adventure novels, Richard, a rootless traveler rambling around Thailand on his way somewhere else, is given a hand-drawn map by a madman who calls himself Daffy Duck. He and two French travelers set out on a journey to find this paradise.
What makes this a truly satisfying novel is the number of levels on which it operates. On the surface it's a fast-paced adventure novel; at another level it explores why we search for these utopias, be they mysterious lost continents or small island communes. Garland weaves a gripping and thought-provoking narrative that suggests we are, in fact, such products of our Western culture that we cannot help but pollute and ultimately destroy the very sanctuary we seek [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Broken Bridge'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I'
The Complete Sherlock Holmes comprises four novels and fifty-six short stories revolving around the worlds most popular and influential fictional detectivethe eccentric, arrogant, and ingenious Sherlock Holmes. He and his trusted friend, Dr. Watson, step from Holmess comfortable quarters at 221b Baker Street into the swirling fog of Victorian London to combine detailed observation and vast knowledge with brilliant deduction. Inevitably, Holmes rescues the innocent, confounds the guilty, and solves the most perplexing puzzles known to literature.
Volume II of The Complete Sherlock Holmes begins with The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, tired of writing about Holmes, had killed him off at the end of The Final Problem, the last tale in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (found in Volume I of The Complete Sherlock Holmes). Public demand for new Holmes stories was so great, however, that Conan Doyle eventually resurrected him. The first story in The Return, The Adventure of the Empty House, features Conan Doyles infamously inventive explanation of how Holmes escaped what seemed like certain death.
This volume also includes two other collections of Holmes stories, His Last Bow and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes; Conan Doyles final full-length Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear; a pair of parodies, The Field Bazaar and How Watson Learned the Trick; and two essays about the private life of the beloved sleuth.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street'
Frances Shore has been warned about Saudi Arabia from the word go. En route to join her uncommunicative engineer husband, she tries to ignore the rumors and rumblings she has already heard--women can't drive, alcohol is illegal, morality regulated. But even she is surprised by the airline steward's surreal lesson. The Saudis are "too bloody secretive to have maps," he tells her. "Besides, the streets are never in the same place for more than a few weeks altogether." Frances's first morning in her new home is not quite what she might have expected. There is no telephone, and Andrew has locked the back door behind him (the previous occupant had the front door bricked up so his wife wouldn't encounter her male neighbors). It is, however, similar to the days to come, which oscillate between boredom and fear--the nights broken only by tedious business dinners and sub rosa distilling. When she is allowed outside, she is assailed by official warnings--highway signs reading "YOU ARE FAST, BUT DANGER IS FASTER," a library handout begging, "PLEASE make EVERY effort to return your books if you have to leave the Kingdom hurriedly and unexpectedly." The outside world is ominous enough, but there's also something odd going on in the apartment building: noise from the supposedly empty flat above. The title of this blackly humorous, frightening novel begins to sound like a reprieve: Frances and Andrew Shore will at least be able to leave the country after 8 months. But Hilary Mantel's final twist destroys any dreams of leaving. As one character had earlier warned: "It isn't the roads in town that are dangerous, it's the roads out." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ernest Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises'
Bloom suggests that signs of the permanent canonical status of the work of Ernest Hemingway seem beyond doubt. He puts The Sun Also Rises on a short list of modern American novels that appear certain to endure.
The title, Ernest Hemingways The Sun Also Rises, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Ernest Hemingways The Sun Also Rises through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Ernest Hemingway, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ernest Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Expatriate Paris: A Cultural and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920's'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Extra Virgin: A Young Woman Discovers the Italian Riviera, Where Every Month Is Enchanted'
Fed up with cold, foggy London and the high cost of real estate, Annie Hawes is persuaded by her sister Lucy to travel to Italy and graft roses for the winter. The sisters arrive in rural Liguria with some formal Italian, no knowledge of rose grafting, and visions of Mediterranean men and sun. What they find is a town full of hard-working, wary olive growers smack in the middle of an olive oil depression who think these two young Englishwomen are nuts. Extra Virgin tells the story of the sisters' acclimation--theirs to Liguria and Liguria to them--and how they fell in love with a crumbling farmhouse in the hills.
Annie quickly finds that though they are only two miles from the Italian Riviera, it might as well be a hundred. Liguria is an old town full of time-honored peculiarities, especially in regard to espresso consumption (never, ever, after lunch; it will close your stomach) and swimming before summertime officially starts. "Seawater at the wrong time of year is even worse for your health than coffee at the wrong time of day, and the beach is only deserted because, as far as the citizens are concerned, if you put so much as a toe into the water before June you are certain to die within the week from exposure or pneumonia or both," says Hawes. Eventually, the sisters are accepted by the townsfolk, though they find the idea of the women buying the farmhouse and running it themselves (there are 50 olive trees on the land) fantastical.
Extra Virgin draws you in to the heart of Liguria and its inhabitants. Hawes has a knack for drawing characters and especially for describing the luscious meals that they are served--and eventually learn to cook. "Lucy and I are kindly allowed to make the tomato-and-basil salad," Hawes says, "and do our best not to be offended by being complemented on how like a proper tomato-and-basil salad it is." Pour yourself an espresso (as long as it's before lunch) or a grappa (aids the digestion), and then sit down to enjoy Extra Virgin. --Dana Van Nest [via]
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F. Scott Fitzgerald has become something of a defining figure of the twenties - the decade he so famously described as 'The Jazz Age'. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's writing is at its finest, exposing a society's tendency towards decadence and moral collapse through a decade of hedonism. Regarded as the most searching and tightly written of his novels, The Great Gatsby was the work that assured Fitzgerald's place amongst the major writers of the twentieth century. In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key critical debates surrounding a novel about which more critical material exists than any other work of American fiction. The extracts and essays included here reflect on The Great Gatsby's place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques, and explore the influence of the work on later American writings. Considering secondary sources from the Twenties to the present, the Guide offers readers an invaluable resource for the study of this complex rendering of a moment in American history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fiesta'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Florence: A Delicate Case'
David Leavitt has long been a writer of rare distinction, and Florence, a Delicate Case is a compact and highly pleasurable book that functions on many levels. Firstly, there is the enjoyment of the prose: Leavitt's pithy, poetic style is immensely evocative, always erudite and unfailingly entertaining. Then there is the detailed and atmospheric evocation of one of the world's most beguiling cities. But most of all, Leavitt's book is a brilliant panoply of some of the most remarkable characters (literary and otherwise) who made Firenze their home.
Beginning by speculating as to why Florence has always proved such a desirable destination for would-be suicides, Leavitt's asks what makes the city (in the words of Henry James) such a "delicate case" for natives and incomers alike. Smoothly negotiating past and present, Leavitt details the history of the foreign colony from the middle of the 19th century until the dark days of the Mussolini era and, later, the last gasp of the Anglo-Florentine colony marked by the passing of such luminaries as Harold Acton and John Pope-Hennessy.
There are marvellously entertaining portraits of such talented visitors to the city as EM Forster, Tchaikovsky and DH Lawrence (Florence was always a centre for the sexual taboo-breakers--Leavitt is particularly perceptive when dealing with the many gay artists and writers who strolled down the Via Tornabuoni). But the author is just as diverting when discussing the wastrels and eccentrics. Who is the book aimed at? That's not quite clear--but if you're interested in the city, or its wildly disparate cast of characters, you're sure to find several tempting nuggets in this concise volume. --Barry Forshaw [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Florian's Gate'
The Iron Curtain has been torn open, setting Poland on the road to democracy. But can true freedom come to those still bound by tragic memories of - Florian's Gate
When Jeffrey Sinclair takes on the challenge of assisting in a high-priced London antique shop, he discovers that more than good salesmanship to wealthy customers is required.
Alexander Kantor, his enigmatic relative and employer, has a reputation for acquiring priceless antiques under mysterious circumstances. As Jeffrey learns the business and becomes more deeply involved, he discovers that the source of the antiques is not the only secret Alexander has hidden.
And the woman Jeffrey loves, Katya Nichols, also has secrets to hide. Even as they travel to Germany and then to Poland on a buying trip for Alexander, Katya's shrouded, undisclosed past acts as a barrier, an Iron Curtain that separates Jeffrey from her love.
His excursion into the Eastern Bloc takes Jeffrey to places he had never imagined to the secret treasure troves of Europe, to poverty-stricken men and women haunted by the past and hoarding their few valuables against a final day of reckoning.
But the journey takes him inward as well, into his own pain and the related wounds of those he loves, a place where only a divine Father can bring hope and light.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gertrude and Alice'
"Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein." Or at least so felt Gertrude Stein, in a sentiment that she shared with few others, except of course Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude and Alice met in 1907 in Paris, and famously shared their lives from that day forth, souls in perfect complement; two magnificently eccentric and idiosyncratic women who became a legendary entity, and who were photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, painted and fêted by Picasso, and visited by writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot. Theirs is a fascinating story, and they have found a wonderful and oddly sympathetic chronicler in Diana Souhami, whose book The Trials of Radclyffe Hall met with critical acclaim, and who proves the perfect counterfoil to the "Steins." Her own touch of genius is barely to consider Gertrude's grand oeuvre, sparing the rod to an already spoiled child and freeing her readership from the unpalatable fare that she generally served up (by contrast, Alice was a dedicated and talented cook).
Literary success came late to Stein--she was 57 when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published--but, like Edith Sitwell, she became, to use a Leavis phrase, more a figure in the history of publicity; the curious thing is that one senses that behind the rhetoric she knew it. After Stein's death in 1946, Toklas became the classic devoted author's widow, finally dying just short of her 90th birthday. She was buried with Gertrude in Père Lachaise cemetery, although her inscription is on the back of the tombstone, as she was ever behind her lover. Souhami's two lives, refreshingly stripped of biographical dead wood, positively crackle with high-powered gossip and bristle with bitchy anecdotes, although her laconic touch is never asleep to the touching cadences, as well as the wonderful absurdities. As a writer, a "literary cubist" who once tried to give up nouns, Stein is more to be admired than respected. As a life force, mover, and shaker, and as partner to Alice, she was massively successful. Their life together--a third life, so to speak--was their greatest creation, and it's done justice by the talented Souhami's glorious account. Gertrude and Alice would have hated it. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Gatsby'
The Great Gatsby, a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heart of Darkness'
JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) was one of the most remarkable figures in English literature. Born in Poland, and originally named Josef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski, he went to sea at the age of seventeen and eventually joined the crew of an English vessel, becoming a British citizen in the process. He retired from the sea in 1894 and took up the pen, writing all his works in English, a language he had only learned as an adult. Despite this, he was a master stylist, both lush and precise. His outsider's eye gave him special insights into the moral dangers of the great age of European empires. The book you hold in your hands -- Conrad's immortal HEART OF DARKNESS -- was the basis for the renowned film, APOCALYPSE NOW. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Empire of Dreams'
In the Empire of Dreams captures expatriate life in a way few novels can--its frustrations, its pleasures, the bittersweet pang of being "irrevocably other." For some of Dianne Highbridge's expats, life in Japan feels like coming home; without knowing it, they've been foreigners all their lives. They're "the real gaijin," as one character puts it,
The ones who can't go home, not just yet. The ones still here, still fumbling for the right words in a language made for not explaining, still searching for lovers whose embraces bring to mind no pain, still hopefully clapping hands before the shrines of gods who will never know them but whose indifference itself seems sweet. The uncertain, the messy, the screwed-up, her own kind.In 10 self-contained chapters, Highbridge paints a series of messy, screwed-up lives. Elaine, the scholar; Cathy, the potter; Gwyneth, the prim Englishwoman whose flight from her homeland fills her with glee: "She escaped! She escaped from everything! From grubby men on bus queues, from headscarves, and gravy, and Tories!" The structure is fragmented, but like so much about this novel, it works: in these vignettes Elaine and Cathy and all of their friends brush by one another much like expatriate acquaintances nodding in the street. Their Japan is one of cherry blossoms and tea ceremonies, to be sure, but it's also one of love hotels, department-store "disaster corners," and monotonous second-rate teaching jobs. Rather than pretending to tell us something new about Japan, Highbridge has told us something new about those who seek it out; the result is a delicate, unsentimental, and surprisingly cohesive book. --Chloe Byrne [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Perdida'
This riveting story is inspired by the author's experiences in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to find herself. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La perdida-at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal-is a story about finding oneself by getting lost. NOTE: Published originally in English with the same title, La perdida. An emotional, beautifully crafted odyssey. -Kirkus Reviews [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Man Without a Country'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Man Without a Country'
Two classics about patriotism and self-reliance. The Man Without a Country was created ìfor the single purpose of teaching young Americans what it is to have a country.î A Message to Garcia immortalizes the real hero of the Cuban War who delivered President McKinleyís letter to Garcia. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Morality for Beautiful Girls'
THE NO.1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY published in 1998, introduced the world to the one and only Precious Ramotswe, the engaging and sassy owner of Botswana's only detective agency. TEARS OF THE GIRAFFE took us further into this world, and now, continuing the adventures of Mma Ramotswe, MORALITY FOR BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, finds her expanding her business to take in the world of car repair and a beauty pageant. Alexander McCall Smith's sense of humour and gentle charm have created a substantial cult following. MORALITY FOR BEAUTIFUL GIRLS will win him yet more fans. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mother's Recompense'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Moveable Feast'
In the preface to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks casually that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction"--and, indeed, fact or fiction, it doesn't matter, for his slim memoir of Paris in the 1920s is as enchanting as anything made up and has become the stuff of legend. Paris in the '20s! Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived happily on $5 a day and still had money for drinks at the Closerie des Lilas, skiing in the Alps, and fishing trips to Spain. On every corner and at every café table, there were the most extraordinary people living wonderful lives and telling fantastic stories. Gertrude Stein invited Hemingway to come every afternoon and sip "fragrant, colorless alcohols" and chat admit her great pictures. He taught Ezra Pound how to box, gossiped with James Joyce, caroused with the fatally insecure Scott Fitzgerald (the acid portraits of him and his wife, Zelda, are notorious). Meanwhile, Hemingway invented a new way of writing based on this simple premise: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
Hemingway beautifully captures the fragile magic of a special time and place, and he manages to be nostalgic without hitting any false notes of sentimentality. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," he concludes. Originally published in 1964, three years after his suicide, A Moveable Feast was the first of his posthumous books and remains the best. --David Laskin [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in Southern France'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris Era Una Fiesta'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris to the Moon'
In 1995 Gopnik was offered the plush assignment of writing the "Paris Journals" for the New Yorker. He spent five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries. A self-described "comic-sentimental essayist," Gopnik chose the romance of Paris in its particulars as his subject. Gopnik falls in unabashed love with what he calls Paris's commonplace civilization--the cafés, the little shops, the ancient carousel in the park, and the small, intricate experiences that happen in such settings. But Paris can also be a difficult city to love, particularly its pompous and abstract official culture with its parallel paper universe. The tension between these two sides of Paris and the country's general brooding over the decline of French dominance in the face of globalization (haute couture, cooking, and sex, as well as the economy, are running deficits) form the subtexts for these finely wrought and witty essays. With his emphasis on the micro in the macro, Gopnik describes trying to get a Thanksgiving turkey delivered during a general strike and his struggle to find an apartment during a government scandal over favoritism in housing allocations. The essays alternate between reports of national and local events and accounts of expatriate family life, with an emphasis on "the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." Gopnik describes some truly delicious moments, from the rites of Parisian haute couture, to the "occupation" of a local brasserie in protest of its purchase by a restaurant tycoon, to the birth of his daughter with the aid of a doctor in black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front. Gopnik makes terrific use of his status as an observer on the fringes of fashionable society to draw some deft comparisons between Paris and New York ("It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones") and do some incisive philosophizing on the nature of both. This is masterful reportage with a winning infusion of intelligence, intimacy, and charm. --Lesley Reed [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'
Widely regarded as Henry Jamess greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the authors most magnificent heroines: Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe.
As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabels life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences.
Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old.
Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of storiesThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3Wwhich won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Scribners British Writers, and on Nerve.com.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Quiet Days in Clichy'
Two of Miller's shorter works, published in 1956 and 1956 by the Olympia Press in Paris as part of the Traveller's Companion Series. Quiet Days in Clichy, a rewrite by Miller of a 1940 piece, gives the account of men in the Paris suburb, their conversations and travels, and, for a short work, rather many of the women they meet. The World of Sex is not a story, but rather a long essay by Miller presenting his views on this singularly important aspect of the human condition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Riders'
Fred waits at the airport for his wife and daughter, a fresh start in front of them. But only the child arrives. This begins Fred's journey across Europe through the underworld of every lover's nightmare, as father and daughter chase the woman who has seemingly ceased to exist. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Russian Debutante's Handbook'
Vladimir Girshkin, a likeable Russian immigrant, searches for love, a decent job, and a credible self-identity in Gary Shteyngart's debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. With a doctor-father of questionable ethics and a manic, banker mother, Vladimir avoids his suburban parents and their desire that he pursue the almighty dollar as proof of success. Vladimir gets by as an immigration clerk, eking out a living in a cruddy New York City apartment while accumulating an array of quirky acquaintances, from a wealthy but disheveled old man (who claims his electric fan speaks to him) desperate for citizenship to Challa, a portly S/M queen. As a love interest, Challa is replaced by Francesca, a graduate student whose friends welcome Vladimir for the status he brings their bohemian clique, and whose parents encourage them to shack up (she lives at home) as visible proof she can maintain a steady relationship.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a quirky amalgam of dead-on American absurdities, albeit with somewhat stereotypical characters. While Vladimir flounders with how to improve his state, he becomes an expatriate in a trendy European city, becomes somewhat of a mobster himself, and generally has a good time. While many of the central characters remain elusively thin, Vladimir is a delight, and Shteyngart's wit is merciless: Russian women wear "wedding cakes of blond hair" and graduate students lounge in a bar "as if waiting for funding to appear." Reminiscent of Gogol and other Russian satirists, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is a genuine, sublime social commentary. --Michael Ferch [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scottish World: A Journey into the Scottish Diaspora'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Season in Spain'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories With Illustrations from the Strand Magazine'
It is more than a century since the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the now legendary and pioneering Strand Magazine began serialising Arthur Conan Doyle's matchless tales of detection, featuring the incomparable sleuth patiently assisted by his doggedly loyal and lovably pedantic friend and companion, Dr Watson. The stories are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat. The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sun Also Rises'
The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.
Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.
But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tender Is The Night, 1934'
In the wake of World War I, a community of expatriate American writers established itself in the salons and cafes of 1920s Paris. They congregated at Gertrude Stein's select soirees, drank too much, married none too wisely, and wrote volumes--about the war, about the Jazz Age, and often about each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were part of this gang of literary Young Turks, and it was while living in France that Fitzgerald began writing Tender Is the Night. Begun in 1925, the novel was not actually published until 1934. By then, Fitzgerald was back in the States and his marriage was on the rocks, destroyed by Zelda's mental illness and alcoholism. Despite the modernist mandate to keep authors and their creations strictly segregated, it's difficult not to look for parallels between Fitzgerald's private life and the lives of his characters, psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole. Certainly the hospital in Switzerland where Zelda was committed in 1929 provided the inspiration for the clinic where Diver meets, treats, and then marries the wealthy Nicole Warren. And Fitzgerald drew both the European locale and many of the characters from places and people he knew from abroad.
In the novel, Dick is eventually ruined--professionally, emotionally, and spiritually--by his union with Nicole. Fitzgerald's fate was not quite so novelistically neat: after Zelda was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed, Fitzgerald went to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1937 to pay her hospital bills. He died three years later--not melodramatically, like poor Jay Gatsby in his swimming pool, but prosaically, while eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper. Of all his novels, Tender Is the Night is arguably the one closest to his heart. As he himself wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Toujours Provence'
Follow up book to "A Year in Provence" by Peter Mayle. [via]
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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: 'Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn'
Forty years have passed since Grove Press first published Henry Miller's landmark masterpiece -- an act that would forever change the face of American literature. Initially banned in America as obscene, Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century." Also banned in America for almost thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. Together, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are a lasting testament to one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century and his contribution not only to literature but to the cause of free speech. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tropico De Cancer/tropic of Cancer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Year in Provence'
Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all Côtes-du-Rhône and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Provençal domesticity.
Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool--its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.
In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun. --L.A. Smith [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Plage'
480pages. poche. broché. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Provence Toujours'
240pages. poche. broché. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'UN Annee En Provence'
Poche: 286 pages Editeur : Seuil; Édition : N° P252 (2 mai 1996) Collection : Points Langue : Français, Anglais [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cuatro Cuartetos/ Four Quartets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mi familia y otros animales'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Palido Fuego'
Esta es una obra maestra, una novela originalisima, desconcertante y diabolicamente divertida, que figura entre las preferidas de su propio autor. Es la edicion postuma de un largo poema escrito por John Shade, gloria de las letras norteamericanas, un poco antes de ser asesinado. Ademas, un prologo, un corpus de notas y un indice comentado del editor, el profesor Charles Kinbote. Mediante sus entrometidos comentarios sobre el poema, su amistad con Shade los meses anteriores a su muerte, y el lejano reino de Zembla, Kinbote va trazando un hilarante autorretaro, en el que se delata como un individuo intolerante y altivo, excentrico y perverso, un autentico y peligroso chiflado. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Der Gross Gatsby'
»Der große Gatsby« bietet ein Sittengemälde der amerikanischen 1920er Jahre und beleuchtet den Zwiespalt zwischen Geld und Liebe, Machtgier und Treue. Sprache und Erzählstil machen den Roman zu einem der herausragenden poetischen Werke Amerikas in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Der Strand'
Ein Traumstrand in Thailand, umgeben von tropischem Dschungel - der junge Engländer Richard glaubt, das Paradies entdeckt zu haben. Nur eine kleine Gruppe junger Rucksacktouristen aus aller Weit teilt die Idylle mit ihm. Doch innerhalb weniger Tage zeigt der Strand sein wahres Gesicht, und Richard stellt fest, daß er in die Hölle geraten ist. [via]
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