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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aloft'
Chang-Rae Lee, named by The New Yorker as one of its 20 writers for the 21st Century, has confirmed his place in that company with Aloft, a masterful treatment of a man coming to terms with his own disaffection. In two previous novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, Lee, a Korean-American, writes of lives being not what they seem: in the first, the protagonist is an undercover agent; in the second, the two halves of Franklin Hata's life never quite come together. Both novels won numerous awards, including Best First Novel, the Hemingway PEN Award, the American Book Award and the Asian-American Literary Award, among others. In Aloft, Lee revisits alienation, a fractured family, mixed heritage and the quest for identity.
Jerry Battle, 59-year-old widower and father of two, retired from the family business--the unmistakably earthbound Battle Brothers Brick and Mortar--buys a small airplane because "From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me." All is not well below. Jerry knows it, saying
...the recurring fantasy of my life... is one of perfect continuous travel, this unending hop from one point to another, the pleasures found not in the singular marvels of any destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures, and the comforting companion knowledge that youll never quite get intimate enough for any trouble to start brewing.
His view from aloft saves him from the gritty reality of the detritus of life--and from life itself.
This high-flyer must come to earth, however, when he finds that his daughter is newly pregnant, diagnosed with cancer, and refusing treatment; his son, who is running the company, has piled up enough debt that bankruptcy is imminent; and his father has gone missing from his assisted living facility. Jerry can no longer say, with impunity, "Jerry Battle hereby declines the Real." Lee takes us on great side trips into the pleasures of food and recreational sex; his wife Daisy's death; his longtime lover Rita's almost endless patience, weaving long, Miltonic sentences that start in one place and end up miles away--flights of fancy--trailing clouds of insight and poignancy. With Aloft Lee just keeps getting better. --Valerie Ryan [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Amagansett'
A major debut novel that tells a mesmerizing story of love, death, and redemption in a small Long Island fishing community in 1947.
Amagansett is a novel as sweeping and haunting as the landscape of sky and sea it evokes. Beautifully and powerfully told, it announces the arrival of a gifted writer who skillfully weaves together a delicate love story, a brutal murder, an unforgettable evocation of a place and time, and characters shaped by the epic forces of nature, class, war, and memory.
Conrad Labarde is a first-generation Basque fisherman who casts his nets in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Living alone among the high dunes on the east end of Long Island, he is kept company only by the ghosts of war. He is a working-class man in a region sharply divided between those who farm and fish this isolated finger of land year-round, and the wealthy, who claim it every summer for seaside escape.
But in postwar America, the landscape is changing quickly. And lives, too, will change dramatically when Conrad's nets pull in the body of a beautiful young woman, seaweed twined in her hair. Deputy Chief of Police Tom Hollis must traverse the shoals of class and community in order to determine if a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom. From the privileged family whose dead daughter was hiding a torturous secret, to the determined cop who seeks the truth, to the fisherman who is always one step ahead of him-they, and everyone else in Amagansett-will be touched by what the waves cast up that day. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Battle of Brooklyn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Battle of Brooklyn 1776'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Battle of Long Island'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Battle of Yorktown'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Between Ocean and Empire: An Illustrated History of Long Island'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charming Billy'
Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity and resignations hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens', New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve." After World War II, both young men had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family--"marvelling, marvelling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives." By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the US, Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anaesthesia of alcohol. Alice McDermott's quiet, striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial wishes. She seems far less interested in the shock of revelation than in her characters' power to live through personal disaster. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide. Amazon.com [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Child of My Heart'
Fifteen is a year of clarity; you're still one of the kids, but you're finally beginning to unlock the mysteries of adult behavior. In her luminous novel Child of My Heart, Alice McDermott's narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has two qualities that give her access to the secret lives of adults: she's beautiful, and she looks after their children. Her beauty has already shaped her life. Her parents have moved the family to the east end of Long Island in hopes of finding her a wealthy husband, or at least a fancy crowd to run with. Here she babysits the children of the rich, whose fathers demonstrate their relative decency by making passes at her, or not. The novel spans a dreamy summer as our heroine spends her days with her various charges at the beach, happily leading her crew on home-grown, rather sweet adventures. Among the kids she looks after is a toddler whose father is a famous, aging artist. The narrator's preternatural acuity is apparent in this exchange with a new client: "Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and babysat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road." Child of My Heart is a pretty straightforward coming-of-age novel, but it's marked throughout by this beautifully honed, wry, knowing tone. McDermott's narrator reminds us that our lost innocence might not have been so innocent after all. --Claire Dederer [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'El Gran Gatsby/the Great Gatsby'
Un magnífico retrato de heroicidad en un mundo decadente.
Esta es la historia del millonario hecho a sí mismo, Jay Gatsby, a quien sólo le mueve una obsesión: recuperar un amor de juventud. Pero Daisy es hoy una muchacha que forma parte de una sociedad frívola y aburrida de sí misma, una criatura encantadora y también dañina. Un magnífico retrato de heroicidad en un mundo decadente. [via]
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In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby'
A guide to reading "The Great Gatsby" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Gatsby'
An assortment of articles treating issues surrounding the Great Gatsby. Part I - From This Side of Paradise to Great Gatsby, Part II, The Great Gatsby and its world, Part III, The Great Gatsby, and Part IV, The Permanence of the Great Gatsby. Includes a bibliography. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heritage of Long Island.'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer's Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road'
In 1966, Allan Weisbecker "made a Manhattan run from the landlocked suburbs" to take in a siren-song movie called The Endless Summer, a documentary that depicted the carefree life of two beach bums who roamed the world in quest of the perfect wave. Weisbecker was hooked, and he became a hardcore wave rider, a fixture on the Long Island surf scene. With a friend, Christopher, he also undertook illegal ways to finance his passion, transporting drugs from exotic countries, a business only briefly interrupted when Christopher went off to Vietnam. There he took fire and came home scarred; something in him changed, and one day he simply vanished.
Weisbecker's book, a sort of gonzo detective story blended with travelogue and peppered with hang-10 jargon, does many things, all of them very well indeed. It offers up a vision of innocent times brought to ruin by war and drugs; it recounts his search for his lost friend, whose life had gone from bad to worse far away from home; and it affords a look inside the strange culture of surfing, whose masters "understood, in a visceral and soulful and inexpressible way, the machinations of the sea, and, by subtle inference, the universe at large."
Full of regret and exhilaration, Weisbecker's memoir is a fine chronicle of a dream gone sour and a friendship redeemed. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Index to Baptismal Surnames in the Reformed Churches of Claverack, Cortlandt, Fishkill ..'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John Paul Jones'
John Paul Jones, considered the father of the American navy, possessed abilities as a naval battle commander that were far ahead of his time -- and contributed greatly to the American side. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leaves of Grass'
In his quest for a truly native idiom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incarnated the American geography and its people in a new and transcendent poetic form. His monumental work, Leaves of Grass, celebrates sexuality, gender equality, and the astonishing beauty of the everyday. For Whitman, "The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to real things, and to real things only."
This complete edition of Leaves of Grass, which includes "Sands at Seventy" (from November Boughs) and "Good-bye My Fancy," contains those poems that have become part of the great American literature, including "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "O Captain, My Captain." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leaves of Grass: Selections'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Little Follies : The Personal History, Adventure, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy (So Far)'
A collection of nine popular novellas features Peter Leroy, an older, reflective man who recalls his childhood in the Clam Capital of America on Long Island. 15,000 first printing. Tour. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Long Island Genealogical Source Material, a Bibliography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Long Island Is My Nation: The Decorative Arts & Craftsmen 1640-1830'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Long Island Printing, 1791-1830 ; a Checklist of Imprints'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Long Island Women: Activists & Innovators'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast'
This beautifully illustrated book features the magnificent estates built in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy residents of Long Island's North Shore. Many of the mansions are no longer standing, making this book a critical archive and monument to their glory. In their heyday, they were inhabited by the aristocracy of America's gilded age, among them Vanderbilts, Phipps, and Pratts. The author's evocative photographs capture the splendor of these once luxurious homes, from the houses' turrets, porticos, columns, and courtyards to their vaulted entry halls, spacious ballrooms, and vast libraries. Accompanied by histories of the estates and the families that built them, this book is a classic and evocative reminder of a bygone era and lifestyle.
This expanded reprint includes a wealth of previously unpublished photographs, and fifteen estates have been added to those included in the original edition.
[via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Memento Mori: The Gravestones of Early Long Island, 1680-1810'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monarch Great Gatsby'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Mother Takes a Tumble'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Peter Leroy: "Life on the Bolotomy", Number 3'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plum Island'
Nelson DeMille's narrative engine is one of the best in the business, and it chugs away in grand style in this story of buried treasure and biological warfare on a tiny spit of land off Long Island. As told by a wry, wounded New York City detective who is drafted to explore a couple of murders, Plum Island is a rich pudding of flavorful (if familiar) ingredients, including a ferocious storm at sea. Other DeMille epics in paperback include By the Rivers of Babylon, The General's Daughter, The Gold Coast, Spencerville, and Word of Honor. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Register...of the Early Settlers of Kings County, Long Island, Ny: From It's First Settlement by Europeans to 1700'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Incidents of Suffolk and Kings Counties: With an Account of the Battle of Long Island and the British Prisons and Prison-Ships at New York'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Static of the Spheres'
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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: 'Then Again Maybe I Won't'
Unable to accept or explain his family's newly acquired wealth, his growing interest in sex, and a friend's shoplifting habit, a thirteen-year-old finds the pains in his stomach getting worse and worse. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Junes'
Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret
sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Pauls death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his familys future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglementsuntil a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.
Love in its limitless formsbetween husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and childrenis the force that moves these characters lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the hearthow family ties, both those were born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Trail Guide to the South Fork'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir'
Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass'
1897. Volume Three of Three. Whitman is considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets. In his work, he celebrates the freedom and dignity of the individual and sings the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. Leaves of Grass is unconventional in both content and technique and is probably the most influential volume of poems in the history of American literature. Other volumes in this set are ISBN(s): 0766194353, 141917665X. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zagatsurvey 2001 Chicago Restaurants'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zagatsurvey 2003/04 Boston Restaurants'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zagatsurvey 2003/04 Chicago'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zagatsurvey 2003/04 Long Island Restaurants'
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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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