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› Find signed collectible books: 'The 158-Pound Marriage'
"Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications."
--The Washington Post
The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive.
"One of the most remarkable things about John Irving's first three novels, viewed from the vantage of The World According to Garp, is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise. . . . The 158-Pound Marriage is as lean and concentrated as a mine shaft."
--Terrence Des Pres [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of the Goons: Incorporating a New Selection of Spike Milligan's Goon Show Scripts And, by Courtesy of Whacklow, Futtle & Crun, (Commissioners for Oaths, Threats Issued), the Authentic, Unexpurgated Inter-Goonal Correspondence of Certain...'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cider House Rules'
First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch-saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cider House Rules: Here in St. Cloud's'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collecting American Brilliant Cut Glass, 1876-1916'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Mundo Segun Garp / The World According to Garp'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fourth Hand'
Like new! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hotel New Hampshire'
The first of my fathers illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels. So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they dream on in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Irving History, Tales, and Sketches'
A writer of great urbanity and poise, Washington Irving was America's first internationally acclaimed man of letters. Here in one volume are the writings that established his reputation and earned him the admiration of Hawthorne, Poe, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, and Dickens. Written in the character of an elderly gentleman of the old school, "Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent." is a series of comic reports on the theater, theater-goers, fashions, balls, courtships, duels, and marriages of his contemporary New York. "Salmagundi" continues this roguish style of satire and burlesque, and its freshness, energy, and accomplishment took the Anglo-American literary scene by storm. "A History of New York," a wild and hilarious spoof combining real New York history with political satire, is presented here in its original, unexpurgated version. "The Sketch Book" is a brilliant, captivating story collection that draws on vanishing folkways, depictions of Hudson Valley life, and fable; it contains Irving's best-loved stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales'
Contains: In addition to title book: The Stout Gentleman; Annette Delarbre; The Hauntedd House; Dolph Heyliger; Rip Van Winkle; The Great Unknown; The Hunting-Dinner; The Adventure of My Uncle; The Adventure Of My Aunt; The Bold Dragoon; The Adventure of the German Student; The Adventure of The Mysterious Picture; The Adventure Of The Myst erious Stranger; The Story of The Young Italian. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales, Or, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent'
With his beloved Gothic tales, Washington Irving is said to have created the genre of the short story in America. Though Irving crafted many of the most memorable characters in fiction, from Rip Van Winkle to Ichabod Crane, his gifts were not confined to the short story alone. He was also a master of satire, essay, travelogue, and folktale, as evidenced in this classic collection.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Every reader has a first book.... which, in early youth, first fascinates his imagination, and at once excites and satisfies the desires of his mind. To me, this first book was The Sketch Book of Washington Irving... The charm of The Sketch Book remains unbroken; the old fascination still lingers about it." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales, Or, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent'
When Washington Irving first published this collection of essays, sketches, and tales--originally entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.--readers greeted it with enthusiasm, and Irving emerged as America's first successful professional author.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," two of America's most recognizable and loved works of fiction, display Irving's ability to depict American landscapes and culture so vividly that readers feel themselves a part of them. And it is on the basis of these two classic tales that Irving is generally credited with inventing the short story as a distinct literary genre. This volume also contains gently ironic pieces about life in England that reflect the author's interest in the traditions of the Old World and his longings for his home in the New.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings'
The first great American man of letters, Washington Irving became an international celebrity almost overnight upon publication of The Sketch Book in 1820, which included the short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. These two tales remain his crowning achievement, but in addition to being a writer of short stories, Irving was also an acclaimed essayist, travel writer, biographer, and historian.
This volume showcases Irvings best work across a variety of genres, including whimsical newspaper articles about New York society, the theater, and contemporary fashions; charming travel pieces that evocatively weave together history and legend; humorous stories and satirical essays from The Sketch-Book and its sequel Bracebridge Hall, and excerpts from A History of New York, considered the first great American book of comic literature. The authors success enabled him to earn a living by writing alone, unheard of for an American at that time.
Irvings energetic, often tongue-in-cheek prose style, together with his ability to blend roguish satire, pathos, and picturesque description, had a profound influence upon the popular culture of his day. His writings have become a cornerstone in the foundation of the American literary tradition.
Peter Norberg received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1998. Since 1997 he has been Assistant Professor of English at Saint Josephs University in Philadelphia. A specialist on the writers associated with the transcendentalist movement, he has written and lectured extensively on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the critical reaction to transcendentalism in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Literary Feuds : A Century of Celebrated Quarrels from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Setting Free the Bears'
It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller.
From the Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sketch Book'
This collection of stories from Washington Irving includes some of America's best-known works of fiction-such as the famous Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow-as well as lesser-known works as The Specter Bridegroom, Westminster Abbey, English Writers on America, Stratford on Avon, The Art of Bookmaking, The Mutability of Literature, and The Christmas Quintet. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Son of the Circus'
"A SON OF THE CIRCUS IS COMIC GENIUS....GET READY FOR IRVING'S MOST RAUCOUS NOVEL TO DATE."
--The Boston Globe
"Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, reared in Bombay by maverick foes of tradition, educated in Vienna, married to an Austrian and long a resident of Toronto, is a 59-year-old without a country, culture or religion to call his own....The novel may not be 'about' India, but Irving's imagined India, which Daruwalla visits periodically, is a remarkable achievement--a pandemonium of servants and clubmen, dwarf clowns and transvestite whores, missionaries and movie stars. This is a land of energetic colliding egos, of modern media clashing with ancient cultures, of broken sexual boundaries."
--New York Newsday
"HIS MOST DARING AND MOST VIBRANT NOVEL...The story of circus-as-India is told with gusto and delightful irreverence."
--Bharati Mukherjee
The Washington Post Book World
"Ringmaster Irving introduces act after act, until three (or more) rings are awhirl at a lunatic pace....[He] spills characters from his imagination as agilely as improbable numbers of clowns pile out of a tiny car....His Bombay and his Indian characters are vibrant and convincing."
--The Wall Street Journal
"IRRESISTIBLE...POWERFUL...Irving's gift for dialogue shines."
--Chicago Tribune
From the Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Two Tales'
In the first of these two tales set in the Catskill Mountains, a man sleeps for twenty years and wakens to a much-changed world; in the second, a superstitious schoolmaster encounters a headless horseman. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Una Mujer Dificil / Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Until I Find You'
Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns - his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead - has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or "scratcher."Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England - including, tellingly, a girls' school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women - from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda's, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack's hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, "sleeping in the needles" and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist's unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can't get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Washington Irving's the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Water-Method Man'
The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
"Three or four times as funny as most novels."
THE NEW YORKER
From the Paperback edition. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Widow for One Year: A Novel'
John Irving fans will not be startled to find that A Widow for One Year is a sprawling farce-tragedy crawling with characters who are writers. In the opening scene, 4-year-old Ruth Cole walks in on her melancholy mother, Marion, who is in flagrante with 16-year-old Eddie, the driver for drunken Ted (Ruth's dad and Marion's estranged, womanizing husband).
Eddie spends the rest of his life obsessively writing novels like Sixty Times, his roman à clef about his 60 seductions by Marion. Ted is a failed novelist who gets rich and famous writing creepy children's stories based on tales he tells Ruth (such as The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls). Marion abandons Ruth, Ted, and Eddie and becomes a successful pseudonymous novelist. And Ruth becomes the most richly celebrated writer of them all because of her early training by Ted, who not only told her stories, but also helped her craft narratives to explain their home's many photographs of her brothers, who died in a gory car wreck the year before she was born. Grief over the boys is why Ruth's mother does not dare to love her.
Ruth, Irving's first female main character, works brilliantly, first as an imaginative, almost Salingeresque child coming to terms with her bewildering family, then as a grownup striving to understand her mother's motives--or at least to track her down. Ted is a mordantly funny caricature, interestingly sinister and plausibly self-justifying when most inexcusable. Eddie is a lovable schlemiel, yet not too sentimentally drawn. And what set pieces Irving can write! The story of the boys' death is horrific and effective in dramatizing the character of Ted, who narrates it. Ted's attempted murder by a spurned lover is as hilarious as the VW-down-the-marble-stairway scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany (which has been adapted by Disney Studios), though not quite on a par with the celebrated "Pension Grillparzer" episode in The World According to Garp (reissued in a 20th anniversary edition by Modern Library).
Irving has the effrontery to get away with practically any scene that comes into his head--Ruth winds up an eyewitness to a hooker's murder in Amsterdam, a Dutch detective starts tracking her down (just as Ruth is hunting Marion), and the multiple plot strands all converge in a finale that neatly echoes the opening scene. It's all done with the outrageously coincidental yet minutely realistic brio of Charles Dickens, with a sad, self-conscious jokiness like that of Irving's mentor, Kurt Vonnegut. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'
"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Cuarta Mano/ the Fourth Hand'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Mundo Segun Garp / The World According to Garp'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oracion Por Owen / A Prayer for Owen Meany'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Principes De Maine'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'L'Oeuvre De Dieu, LA Part Du Diable'
733pages. poche. Poche. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gottes Werk Und Teufels Beitrag'
Slight signs of wear! [via]
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