| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]
More editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Centennial'
More editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Centennial:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ahab's Wife Or, the Star-Gazer'
It has been said that one can see farther only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honors that aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into early-19th-century America. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman, she suggests that New England life was broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships, and whales. This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from his lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general.
Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her father's puritanism and to pursue a more exalted life. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck:
I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe.The ship dies, but Una returns to land to pursue the life of the mind. The novel's opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--also diminishes Melville's hero in the broader scheme of things. Naslund exposes the reader to the unsung, real-life heroes of Melville's world, including Margaret Fuller and her Boston salon, and Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. There is a chance meeting with a veiled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the woods, and throughout the novel the story brims with references to the giants of literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Although her novel runs long at nearly 700 pages, Naslund has created an imaginative, entertaining, and very impressive work. --Ted Leventhal [via]
More editions of Ahab's Wife Or, the Star-Gazer:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Alchemist'
PAULO COELHO'S enchanted novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicityand inspired wisdom . is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egiptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids.... [via]
More editions of The Alchemist:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Alchemist/a Fable About Following Your Dream'
Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.
Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." --Gail Hudson [via]
More editions of The Alchemist/a Fable About Following Your Dream:
› Find signed collectible books: 'American Gods'
American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton [via]
More editions of American Gods:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Anansi Boys: Library Edition'
One of fiction's most audaciously original talents, Neil Gaiman now gives us a mythology for a modern age -- complete with dark prophecy, family dysfunction, mystical deceptions, and killer birds. Not to mention a lime.
Anansi Boys
God is dead. Meet the kids.
When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts" his father bestowed -- before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life.
Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who's going to show Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun ... just like Dear Old Dad. And all of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting for Fat Charlie.
Because, you see, Charlie's dad wasn't just any dad. He was Anansi, a trickster god, the spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could cheat even Death himself.
Returning to the territory he so brilliantly explored in his masterful New York Times bestseller, American Gods, the incomparable Neil Gaiman offers up a work of dazzling ingenuity, a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth that is at once startling, terrifying, exhilarating, and fiercely funny -- a true wonder of a novel that confirms Stephen King's glowing assessment of the author as "a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him."
[via]More editions of Anansi Boys: Library Edition:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Astonishing Splashes of Colour'
Taking its title from a description of Peter Pan's Neverland, Astonishing Splashes of Colour follows the life of Kitty, a woman who, in a sense, has never grown up. As her moods swing dramatically from high to low, they are illuminated by an unusual ability to interpret people and emotions through colour.
Kitty struggles to come to terms with her life, including the loss of her mother, a miscarriage, and an unconventional marriage to her husband, who lives in the apartment next door. And when her father and brothers reveal a family secret long hidden, it overwhelms Kitty's tenuous hold on reality and propels her on an impetuous journey to the brink of madness.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
[via]More editions of Astonishing Splashes of Colour:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Autumn of the Patriarch'
"Majestic . . . Superb . . . a stunning portrait of the archetype, the pathological fascist tyrant. Garcia Marquez is as exorbitant as Melville and Dostoyevsky."New York Times Book Review [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Beasts Of No Nation'
More editions of Beasts Of No Nation:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Biographer's Tale'
More editions of The Biographer's Tale:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Heaven'
More editions of Blue Heaven:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Buddha of Suburbia'
There's quite a bit of activity in Buddha of Suburbia. A bureaucrat becomes a suburban guru who marries a follower with a son who's a punk rocker named Charlie Hero. Consequently, the guru's son is propelled from his bland life into a series of erotic experiences in London. All the while, Hanif Kureishi keeps the tone lively with wry wit. On the description of suburban life: "We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics to 'I Am the Walrus.'" He also bends cultures, classes and genders while blasting the racism of British life in this 1990 Whitbread Prize winner. [via]
More editions of The Buddha of Suburbia:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Castle: Classic Collection'
They are perhaps the most famous literary instructions never followed: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread...." Thankfully, Max Brod did not honor his friend Franz Kafka's final wishes. Instead, he did everything within his power to ensure that Kafka's work would find publication--including making some sweeping changes in the original texts. Until recently, the world has known only Brod's version of Kafka, with its altered punctuation, word order, and chapter divisions. Restoring much of what had previously been expunged, as well as the fluid, oral quality of Kafka's original German, Mark Harman's new translation of The Castle is a major literary event.
One of three unfinished novels left after Kafka's death, The Castle is in many ways the writer's most enduring and influential work. In Harman's muscular translation, Kafka's text seems more modern than ever, the words tumbling over one another, the sentences separated only by commas. Harman's version also ends the same way as Kafka's original manuscript--that is, in mid-sentence: "She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said--." For anyone used to reading Kafka in his artificially complete form, the effect is extraordinary; it is as if Kafka himself had just stepped from the room, leaving behind him a work whose resolution is the more haunting for being forever out of reach. [via]
More editions of The Castle: Classic Collection:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Charms for the Easy Life'
A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.
Sophia, Margaret, and Charlie Kate find strength in a time when women almost always depended on men, and their bond deepens as each one experiences love and loss during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life is a passionate, luminous, and exhilarating story about embracing what life has to offer ... even if it means finding it in unconventional ways.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. [via]More editions of Charms for the Easy Life:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Clara Callan'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Stories'
Carol Shields's collection of short stories is the definitive anthology of this genre of her work. It contains all previously published stories and one entirely new: "Segue," her last work. She died of cancer in July of 2003, after fighting the good fight, for the second time. The book is introduced by Margaret Atwood, another widely read Canadian author, who was a longtime friend and admirer of Shields.
The stories are truly remarkable, combining great humor with poignant observation--an exploration of the idiosyncracies of our friends, lovers, spouses, and children, and the gift of being a true storyteller. She glories in writing about the mundane: grocery shopping, ballet lessons, mowing the lawn; and in the quirky, as in a young boy's grandfather who becomes a "naturist," a grandmother who was North America's Turkey Queen in Ramona, California, and wore a dress made completely of turkey feathers. Her writing is full of wonder and serendipity: "Roger, aged thirty, employed by the Gas Board, is coming out of a corner grocers carrying a mango in his left hand. He went in to buy an apple and came out with this." Now, what will turn out to be important here: Roger's age, his employment, why the mango instead of the apple, and, is he left-handed? Carol Shields will sort it all out for the reader, in the most enjoyable way possible. While her stories are accessible, they are never trivial. Each one is finely crafted, illuminating something about a person, a relationship, an event.
In "Segue," Max and Jane begin their Sunday morning buying bread and flowers; he, an accomplished novelist, she, a writer of sonnets. They proceed to luncheon at their daughter's house, return home to conversation, reading, roast chicken, and evening reverie. Jane reflects upon her aging body: "My aging is me too, as well as the subject of my current sonnet. Only two years ago the idea of aging belonged to the whole world. It was background. I hadn't been touched by it then. Now I am." Touched by age and encroaching illness, Carol Shields wrote one last marvelous story.
In her foreword, Margaret Atwood, who visited Shields only two months before she died, writes: "We did not speak of her illness. She preferred to be treated as a person who was living, not one who was dying." This attitude of mind is reflected in the fabric of all her work, in its clarity, its appreciation of the absurd, and in her understanding of the human condition. --Valerie Ryan [via]
More editions of The Collected Stories:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics'
For the first time ever, these seven essential volumes by C. S. Lewis are available in a single edition. This remarkable book presents the classic works Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, A Grief Observed, and Lewis's prophetic examination of universal values, The Abolition of Man. Beautiful and timeless, this is a vital collection by one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Lewis reached a vast audience during his lifetime, and books such as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters continue to be regarded as among the best spiritual writing of all time. With his uncanny grasp of human nature, Lewis offers a refreshing antidote to the modern world's consumerism and moral relativism. This new edition of his most celebrated books highlights Lewis's compassion for humanity and his relevance for the twenty-first century. [via]
More editions of The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Count of Monte Cristo'
More editions of Count of Monte Cristo:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Crime as Work'
More editions of Crime as Work:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories'
A collection of fifteen short stories exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, based on the author's childhood in the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. From the author of SOMETHING I'VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU, THEMOONS OF JUPITER and THE BEGGAR MAID. [via]
More editions of Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Death in Venice and Other Stories'
More editions of Death in Venice and Other Stories:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Don Quixote'
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. [via]More editions of Don Quixote:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dracula'
More editions of Dracula:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Earthly Powers'
'Crowded, crammed, bursting with manic erudition, garlicky puns, omnilingual jokes...which meshes the real and personalised history of the twentieth century' - Martin Amis. Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by a common understanding of mankind's frailties. In this epic masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power and the lengths men will go for it. [via]
More editions of Earthly Powers:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Far from the Madding Crowd'
It's Time To Rediscover
The Wonderful Books
We All Cherish.
First published in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's first commerically successful novel. Set in the fictional Wessex countryside in the 1840s, it tells the story of the beautiful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene. Forced to choose between three suitors, Bathsheba makes a disastrous decision, which leads to both tragedy and true love.
Far from the Madding Crowd remains one of the most enduring English novels of our time, and one of Hardy's most popular. [via]
More editions of Far from the Madding Crowd:
› Find signed collectible books: 'First Love, Last Rites'
A collection of short stories, focusing on the awakening sensations of first love and its ritual initiations. This collection won the Somerset Maugham Award, and is from the author of THE CEMENT GARDEN, THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS and THE CHILD IN TIME. [via]
More editions of First Love, Last Rites:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Galapagos: Key Environments'
More editions of Galapagos: Key Environments:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Girlfriend in a Coma'
In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X--who is himself now a dangerously mature 36--boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon--lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well--for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semiresponsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then ... Karen wakes up. Her astonishment--which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle--dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn--which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it. [via]
More editions of Girlfriend in a Coma:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hell'
More editions of Hell:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Henderson the Rain King'
Bellow's glorious, spirited story of an eccentric American millionaire who finds a home of sorts in deepest Africa. [via]
More editions of Henderson the Rain King:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Herzog'
More editions of Herzog:
› Find signed collectible books: 'I, Claudius'
Having never seen the famous 1970s television series based on Graves' historical novel of ancient Rome and being generally uneducated about matters both ancient and Roman, I wasn't prepared for such an engaging book. But it's a ripping good read, this fictional autobiography set in the Roman Empire's days of glory and decadence. As a history lesson, it's fabulous; as a novel it's also wonderful. Best is Claudius himself, the stutterer who let everyone think he was an idiot (to avoid getting poisoned) but who reveals himself in the narrative to be a wry and likable observer. His story continues in Claudius the God. [via]
More editions of I, Claudius:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Illustrated Alchemist'
Amazon.co.uk Review Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sense a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalucian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream. Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night. "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." [via]
More editions of The Illustrated Alchemist:

› Find signed collectible books: 'In a Free State'
More editions of In a Free State:
› Find signed collectible books: 'In Evil Hour'
Written just before One Hundred Years of Solitude, this fascinating novel of a Colombian river town possessed by evil points to the author's later flowering and greatness. [via]
More editions of In Evil Hour:
› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Country of Last Things'
In a distant and unsettling future, Anna Blume is on a mission in an unnamed city of chaos and disaster. Its destitute inhabitants scavenge garbage for food and shelter, no industry exists, and an elusive government provides nothing but corruption. Anna wades through the filth to find her long-lost brother, a one-time journalist who may or may not be alive.
New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) shows us a disturbing Hobbesian society in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel.
More editions of In the Country of Last Things:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Keeping Faith'
A triumph. This novels haunting strength will hold the reader until the very end and make Faith and her story impossible to forget.
Richmond Times Dispatch
Extraordinary.
Orlando Sentinel
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes, Change of Heart, Handle with Care) comes Keeping Faith: an addictively readable (Entertainment Weekly) novel that makes you wonder about God. And that is a rare moment, indeed, in modern fiction (USA Today).
[via]![Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings [translated from the Spanish] Borges, Jorge Luis: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings [translated from the Spanish]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0140029818.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
› Find signed collectible books: 'Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings [translated from the Spanish]'
More editions of Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings [translated from the Spanish]:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Light in August'
To declare that Light in August is William Faulkner's finest work would be to invoke debate of irreconcilable conclusion. Yet for many followers of Faulkner, this novel showcases many of his best moments and characters. As usual, he mines the rich soil of Mississippi mud to create his subjects, this time in the form of Reverend Gail Hightower, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas. The issue of black and white and rich and poor is prevalent, though to draw lines that clear would be a disservice to Faulkner's immensely layered text and the multicolored beauty of his writing. [via]
More editions of Light in August:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Living'
Listening to Lawrence Luckinbill read Annie Dillard's historical novel The Living takes a little getting used to. The very first sentence reveals a pronounced and distracting lisp, but don't let that dissuade you from continuing. Luckinbill's voice also exhibits a simple honesty, a gruffness that is perfectly suited to the steely pioneer spirit of Dillard's story. Surprisingly quickly, the vocal idiosyncrasy fades away, leaving only the emotional resonance of Luckenbill's obviously heartfelt connection to this powerful tale.
Dillard's finely crafted prose and Luckinbill's sincere voice carry you back to the early days of American expansion, into the truly Wild West and the stone-hard life these settlers would be forced to endure. "She had cried out to God all day and maybe all night, too, that he would lend her strength to bear affliction and go on. She was not aware that underneath she prayed another prayer as if to a power above God, or at least to his better nature, that he was finished with the worst of it." Of course, God isn't finished, and neither are these brave souls. Dillard opens their world slowly, stretching the horizon generation by generation, tethering the fate of one small family to that of the struggling town that they are helping to build and, ultimately, to the inexorable rise of the emerging nation. (Running time: six hours, four cassettes) --George Laney [via]
More editions of The Living:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Love'
More editions of Love:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lyre of Orpheus'
More editions of The Lyre of Orpheus:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magus'
A novel which explores the complexities of the human mind. On a remote Greek island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. Surreal threads weave ever tighter as reality and illusion intertwine in a bizarre psychological game. [via]
More editions of The Magus:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mathematics of Love'
More editions of The Mathematics of Love:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Microserfs'
Microserfs is not about Microsoft--it's about programmers who are searching for lives. A hilarious but frighteningly real look at geek life in the '90's, Coupland's book manifests a peculiar sense of how technology affects the human race and how it will continue to affect all of us. Microserfs is the hilarious journal of Dan, an ex-Microsoft programmer who, with his coder comrades, is on a quest to find purpose in life. This isn't just fodder for techies. The thoughts and fears of the not-so-stereotypical characters are easy for any of us to relate to, and their witty conversations and quirky view of the world make this a surprisingly thought-provoking book.
" ... just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s," muses one programmer. "I mean, all those Nerf toys and free beverages! And the way tech firms won't even call work 'the office,' but instead, 'the campus.' It's sick and evil." [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Moon Palace'
More editions of Moon Palace:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr. Sammler's Planet'
Attentive to everything, appalled by nothing, "Is it time to go? Blow or be blown?" Mr Sammler asks dispassionately, speculating on the future life of this--or any--planet in this superbly written tragicomexistentianihilistic coup-de-grace. 8 cassettes. [via]
More editions of Mr. Sammler's Planet:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables'
More editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Confessions'
More editions of The New Confessions:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Nice Work'
"A funny, intelligent, superbly paced social comedy." -- The New York Times Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds--and about themselves. [via]
More editions of Nice Work:
› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon'
Polly Holliday of TV's Home Improvement won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, "aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that "effused" as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.
Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.
But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.
Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.
The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.
One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Orlando: A Biography'
In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon. [via]
More editions of Orlando: A Biography:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Oscar and Lucinda'
More editions of Oscar and Lucinda:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pearl the Red Pony'
More editions of The Pearl the Red Pony:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Pilgrim'
More editions of Pilgrim:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'
Through a year of on-foot explorations through her own landscape, Annie Dillard shares her keen observations, poetic sensibilities, introspective reflections, and reverence for her surroundings to show us the world outside as we have never seen it before, in this winner of the 1975 Pulitizer Prize for nonfiction.. [via]
More editions of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'
This is an electronic edition of the complete book complemented by author biography. This book features the table of contents linked to every chapter. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the Kindle, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including the Kindle, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.
************
The Portrait of a Lady is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who "affronts her destiny" and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. Like many of James' novels, it is set mostly in Europe, notably England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase of writing, this novel reflects James's continuing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, often to the detriment of the former. It also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal, and sexuality.
Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
More e-Books from MobileReference - Best Books. Best Price. Best Search and Navigation (TM)
All fiction books are only $0.99. All collections are only $5.99
Designed for optimal navigation on Kindle and other electronic devices
Search for any title: enter mobi (shortened MobileReference) and a keyword; for example: mobi Shakespeare
To view all books, click on the MobileReference link next to a book title
Literary Classics: Over 10,000 complete works by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Dickens, Tolstoy, and other authors. All books feature hyperlinked table of contents, footnotes, and author biography. Books are also available as collections, organized by an author. Collections simplify book access through categorical, alphabetical, and chronological indexes. They offer lower price, convenience of one-time download, and reduce clutter of titles in your digital library.
Religion: The Illustrated King James Bible, American Standard Bible, World English Bible (Modern Translation), Mormon Church's Sacred Texts
Philosophy: Rousseau, Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Engels
Travel Guides and Phrasebooks for All Major Cities: New York, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, Prague, Beijing, Greece
Medical Study Guides: Anatomy and Physiology, Pharmacology, Abbreviations and Terminology, Human Nervous System, Biochemistry
College Study Guides: FREE Weight and Measures, Physics, Math, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Statistics, Languages, Philosophy, Psychology, Mythology
History: Art History, American Presidents, U.S. History, Encyclopedias of Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt
Health: Acupressure Guide, First Aid Guide, Art of Love, Cookbook, Cocktails, Astrology
Reference: The World's Biggest Mobile Encyclopedia; CIA World Factbook, Illustrated Encyclopedias of Birds, Mammals
[via]More editions of The Portrait of a Lady:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Republic of Love'
More editions of The Republic of Love:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Road to Lichfield'
More editions of The Road to Lichfield:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scarlet Letter'
More editions of The Scarlet Letter:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Screwtape Letters'
This adaptation of C.S. Lewis's biting satire received a 1999 Grammy nomination for best spoken-word performance, and it's easy to see why--the story fits the format perfectly. It's relatively brief (the unabridged reading takes a mere four hours), and contains only one character--the demon Screwtape, who writes letters to his novice nephew Wormwood, instructing him on how to best tempt his "patient" (a wayward soul on earth) into the bosom of "our Lord below."
Obviously, the book wasn't written with former Monty Python John Cleese in mind, but it's hard to imagine a better Screwtape. Cleese's voice provides the perfect vehicle for Lewis's dry, razor-edged wit. His uncanny comic timing and ability to milk each phrase for maximum effect betray an infectious enthusiasm for the story. It's clear that he's having a great time reading, and it's impossible not to laugh along with him. This inspired pairing of two of the 20th century's greatest wits makes for a meditation on the dark side of spiritual guidance that's as relevant and funny today as it was in Lewis's war-torn England. (Running time: 4 hours, 3 cassettes) --Andrew Neiland [via]
More editions of The Screwtape Letters:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sea, the Sea'
More editions of The Sea, the Sea:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sheltering Sky'
American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Shuttlecock'
More editions of Shuttlecock:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Small Ceremonies'
More editions of Small Ceremonies:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Soul Mountain'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Swann'
More editions of Swann:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Men in a Boat'
The famous story of three men and a dog setting off in an open boat on a hilarious voyage up the Thames. The story is full of mishaps - falling into the river and getting lost in Hampton Court Maze - but also offers comments on the world. This excursion was undertaken at the end of the last century and comments on the times have acquired a deeper fascination. [via]
More editions of Three Men in a Boat:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Valmont'
More editions of Valmont:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Way the Crow Flies'
More editions of The Way the Crow Flies:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Women in Love'
The erotic sequel to The Rainbow chronicles the lives, loves, obsessions, and struggles of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their lovers, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, as they search for fulfillment in post-World War I society. Reprint. [via]
More editions of Women in Love:
› Find signed collectible books: 'El Alquimista / The Alchemist'
La mágica historia de Paulo Coelho, que trata sobre Santiago, un niño pastor andaluz que viaja en busca de un tesoro material, nos enseña la importancia que tiene el saber eschuchar lo que nos dice el corazón, a aprender a leer los presagios dispersados por el camino de nuestras vidas y, sobre todo, a seguir nuestros sueños.
El Alquimista, ahora por primera vez disponible en España en Norte America, ha sido aclamado en España y en America Latina como una de las novelas mas importantes de la década.
[via]More editions of El Alquimista / The Alchemist:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Cartas Del Diablo a Su Sobrino'
El eterno clásico sobre "las últimas novedades del Infierno y las irrebatibles respuestas del Cielo"
Esta clásica obra maestra de sátira ha entretenido e iluminado a lectores alrededor del mundo con su irónica y astuta representación de la vida y las debilidades humanas desde el punto de vista de Escrutopo, el asistente de alto rango de "Nuestro Padre de Abajo." En este divertidísimo, muy serio y excepcionalmente original libro, C. S. Lewis comparte con nosotros la correspondencia entre el viejo diablo y su sobrino Orugario, un novato demonio encargado de asegurarse de la condenación de un joven hombre.
Cartas del Diablo a Su Sobrino es la historia más atractiva acerca de la tentación -- y el triunfo sobre ella -- jamás escrita.
[via]More editions of Cartas Del Diablo a Su Sobrino:
Results page: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101-141 NEXT
