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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography of Red'
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse, the author's first. A classicist by profession as well as a poet, Carson has drawn on antiquity for her cast, updating the myth of Geryon and Herakles. In the original version, of course, Herakles killed the red-skinned, winged Geryon. In Carson's very contemporary retelling, he merely inspires, but does not return, the monster's passion. By choosing Geryon as her central character, Carson can bring up the questions of existence as if they hadn't been asked before. After all, the monster's instincts have not been numbed by civilization. Fires twist through him. We feel the pain of learning the most elementary things, and then the volcanic intensity that comes with that more advanced thing, love. Yet Carson doesn't so much tell the story of Geryon's love as mediate his very being through semiological surfaces: cafes, video stores, lipstick, a library where he shelves government documents with a "forlorn austerity, / tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war." Carson seldom satisfies herself with an image of the world. Instead she atomizes the world, leaving it broken down, refracted, and glinting. At times her verbal pyrotechnics manage to render pure energy:
A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.No novelist could have gotten away with that last line. Yet it's very much to the point: Carson's Geryon is, among other things, a camera freak who doesn't understand that an observer must inevitably alter the nature of the thing observed. Here is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, cheek-by-jowl with the ancients! And indeed, Carson's achievement is to interweave the archaic and the modern so seamlessly that by the time we finish reading Autobiography of Red, the entire landscape looks inside out. --Mark Rudman [via]
A yellowing 5 x 7 index card
Scotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.
Geryon went flickering
through the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.
The librarians thought him
a talented boy with a shadow side.
› Find signed collectible books: 'Axel's Castle : A Story of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930'
If great writers are hard to find, then it's safe to say great literary critics are as rare as wild white tigers who can juggle plates. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of America's most important critics, and Axel's Castle was the book that put him on the map. Few people outside graduate school read serious literary criticism, but a look into Wilson's intense thought and clear prose makes you wonder why the genre has been neglected. If you're a lover of the Modernist writers--Wilson looks specifically at Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Stein, and Rimbaud here--then you'll enjoy Axel's Castle. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Axel's Castle: A Study of Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930'
If great writers are hard to find, then it's safe to say great literary critics are as rare as wild white tigers who can juggle plates. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of America's most important critics, and Axel's Castle was the book that put him on the map. Few people outside graduate school read serious literary criticism, but a look into Wilson's intense thought and clear prose makes you wonder why the genre has been neglected. If you're a lover of the Modernist writers--Wilson looks specifically at Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Stein, and Rimbaud here--then you'll enjoy Axel's Castle. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Baby Precious Always Shines'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood on the Dining-Room Floor'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Salt'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Charmed Circle'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everybody's Autobiography'
Everybody's Autobiography is among the very best of Gertrude's writing--[it] speaks with the true and original voice of Gertrude Stein, without apparent art or bravado.--Janet HobhouseIn 1937, Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work was long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences in the wake of having authored a bestseller, Everybody's Autobiography is as funny and engaging as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is also a searing meditation on the meaning of success and identity in America. Posing as the representative American, Stein transforms her story into history--responding to the tradition of Thoreau and Henry Adams, she writes: "I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure." Everybody's Autobiography is Stein at her most accessible and her most serious, and may yet prove to be among her most popular books. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Everybody's Autonomy : Connective Reading and Collective Identity'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'From the Making of Americans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gertrude and Alice'
"Twentieth century literature is Gertrude Stein," or at least so thought Gertrude Stein. The sentiment was shared by Alice B. Toklas--her longtime companion--and few others. Stein and Toklas 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. They were photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, painted and feted 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 foil to the "Steins." Her own touch of genius is to barely consider Gertrude's grand oeuvre, sparing the rod to an already spoilt child and freeing her readership from the unpalatable fare 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. After Stein's death in 1946, Toklas became the classic devoted author's widow, until her own death, just short of her 90th birthday. She was buried alongside Stein in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery, though her inscription is on the back of the tombstone, as 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, though her laconic touch is never asleep to touching cadences and 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, a mover and shaker, and as a partner to Toklas, she was massively successful. Their couple's life together 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: 'Gertrude Stein: Ein Leben in Bildern Und Texten'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures A Photobiography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gertrude Stein's America'
Gilbert A. Harrison, for many years editor in chief of the New Republic, was one of Stein's publishers. For this volume, he selected excerpts from her essays, novels, plays, poems, lectures, and interviews, to introduce readers to a little-known aspect of her work.
The groundbreaking writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was intensely American, though she lived most of her life in France. She returned only once to the United States, having left it at the age of twenty-nine, yet she never lost her plain American accent and manner nor her ardor for the United States. Stein approached her country with an appreciation akin to discovery. She wrote about it allrailroad stations, mailboxes, cities, farms, five-and-dime stores, drugstores, the food, the landscape, the speech, the ideas.More editions of Gertrude Stein's America:

› Find signed collectible books: 'History or Messages from History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How I Read Gertrude Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How to Write'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How Writing Is Written'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lectures in America'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lucy Church Amiably'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Making of Americans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein With Two Shorter Stories'
One way perhaps of winning is to make a little one to come through them little like the baby that once was all them and lost them their everlasting feeling. Some can win from just the feeling the little one need not come to give it to them. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Novel of Thank You'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Operas & Plays'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris Era Una Fiesta'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris France'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Reader: 25'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology With Essays by Judy Grahn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'S*Perm**K*T'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Operas & Plays of Gertrude Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Short Talks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stanzas in Meditation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew'
Ursula K. Le Guin's extraordinary writing primer is full of charm, wit, and opinion. Le Guin likens writing to "steering a craft," and as one reads through this volume, one has the sense of floating down a river, with the waves of Le Guin's words lapping at one's craft. Le Guin veers sharply from the mainstream of contemporary writing manuals by challenging their very definition of story. While it is common to "conflate story with conflict," Le Guin writes, she finds that limiting. "Story is change," she says. While that change may be the result of conflict, it is just as likely to evolve from "relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, [or] parting." Le Guin demonstrates this complexity with well-hewn excerpts from the works of such writers as Jane Austen, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charlotte Brontë, and especially Virginia Woolf. The many aspects of fine fiction writing Le Guin addresses here include the role of the narrative sentence (its "chief duty [is] to lead to the next sentence--to keep the story going"); avoiding exposition doldrums ("break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with"); and the concept of "crowding and leaping." While prose should be "crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications," don't forget that "what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in."
Accompanying Le Guin's text is a handful of clever writing exercises, each as enticing as its name. Among them are "I am García Márquez," which requires writing with no punctuation; "Chastity," which challenges one to write without adjectives or adverbs; and "A Terrible Thing to Do," which proposes taking an earlier exercise and cutting it--by half. --Jane Steinberg [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stein, 1903-1932 Vol. 1: Q. E. D.; Three Lives; Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Portraits'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tender Buttons'
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Gay; Poetry / General; Fiction / Gay; Poetry / American / General; [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tender Buttons:Objects, Food, Rooms: Objects, Food, Rooms'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Lives'
At first glance, Three Lives seems to be three straightforward portraits of women living in the early twentieth century. The Good Anna describes an exacting German house servant; Melanctha explores the love affair of an African-American woman; and The Gentle Lena narrates the fate of a patient German maid. Yet these are daring prose experiments that reflect Gertrude Steins revolt against the popular narrative style of realism. As she composed these works, Stein sought to emulate the aesthetic of the innovative painters Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. She rejected the more traditionally literary emphasis on social order and plot, replacing these with a focus on language, tone, and description. The result is a simple yet stunning view of the lives of three distinct women.
Self-published in 1909, Three Lives catapulted Stein to the forefront of the influential American Modernist movement, which inspired such later novelists as Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.
Jonathan Levin is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, as well as numerous essays and reviews.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Lives'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Useful Knowledge'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Warhol Project'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What Is Remembered'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of Montparnasse'
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