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› Find signed collectible books: 'All the King's Men'
This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room deal-makers. Though Stark quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn in the new governor's side. Stark becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price, one that eventually costs him his life. The award-winning book is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all wrapped in the cloak of history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening'
An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening and Selected Stories'
The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers with its treatment of sex and suicide. In a departure from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class convention are the themes of this now-classic novel. The book was influenced by French writers ranging from Flaubert to Maupassant, and can be seen as a precursor of the impressionistic, mood-driven novels of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Variously called "vulgar, " "unhealthily introspective, " and "morbid, " the book was neglected for several decades, not least because it was written by a "regional" woman writer. This edition also includes selected stories from Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, and an introduction and notes by Nina Baym. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin'
I used this book for a college class... But read it again because it was SOOOO good! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cadillac Jukebox'
One of Burke's series of crime stories set in the Louisiana bayou country, this story chronicles the difficult mission of Sheriff's Deputy Dave Robicheaux to confirm the guilt of a redneck named Aaron Crown in the killing of a civil rights leader back in the 1960s, and to find out what Crown's recent arrest has to do with an upcoming gubernatorial election. His task becomes mired in the history and inbred politics of New Iberia and thwarted by a ghoulish hit man who crawls out of the swamps to silence police informants. A wild story with enough oddball characters to make it interesting and worthwhile. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Cane River'
Lalita Tademy's riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable "bleaching of the line" as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area's white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.
The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.
When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman, she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma 'Tite (short for "Mademoiselle Petite"). She resented her great-grandmother's skin-color biases, which were as much a part of Tademy's memory as were her great-grandmother's trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune 500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors. --Regina Marler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cliffscomplete Chopin's the Awakening'
CliffsComplete The Awakening offers insight and information into a work considered scandalous when it arrived from the turn-of-the-20th-century presses. Every generation since has been able to identify with some social or thematic aspect of the novel.
Discover what happens to this heroine who found her husband dull, married life dreary and confining, and motherhood to be bondage and save valuable studying time all at once. Enhance your reading of The Awakening with these additional features:
Streamline your literature study with all-in-one help from CliffsComplete guides!
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Novels and Stories'
From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women, culminating in her masterpiece The Awakening (1899), challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin's novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume.
The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales of post-Civil War bayou culture. In The Awakening, the now-classic novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her writing career, Chopin tells the story of a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment.
The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for "A Vocation and a Voice," a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900, and three stories that were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Confederacy of Dunces'
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Lana Lee and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead as a Doornail'
When Sookie's brother Jason's eyes start to change, she knows he's about to turn into a were-panther for the first time. But her concern becomes cold fear when a sniper sets his deadly sights on the local changeling population-and Jason's new panther brethren suspect he may be the shooter. Now, Sookie has until the next full moon to find out who's behind the attacks, unless the killer decides to find her first.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead To The World'
Book 4 to the Sookie Stackhouse series. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Until Dark'
Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much - not because she's not pretty - she's a very cute bubbly blonde - or not interested in a social life. She really is ...but Sookie's got a bit of a disability. She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill: he's tall, he's dark and he's handsome - and Sookie can't 'hear' a word he's thinking. He's exactly the type of guy she's been waiting all her life for. But Bill has a disability of his own: he's fussy about his food, he doesn't like suntans and he's never around during the day ...Yep, Bill's a vampire. Worse than that, he hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, with a reputation for trouble - of the murderous kind. And then one of Sookie's colleagues at the bar is killed, and it's beginning to look like Sookie might be the next victim ... [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Definitely Dead'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood: A Novel'
Wells is a Louisiana-born Seattle actress and playwright; her loopy saga of a 40-year-old player in Seattle's hot theater scene who must come to terms with her mama's past in steamy Thornton City, Louisiana, reads like a lengthy episode of Designing Women written under the influence of mint juleps and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. The Ya-Yas are the wild circle of girls who swirl around the narrator Siddalee's mama, Vivi, whose vivid voice is "part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah." The Ya-Yas broke the no-booze rule at the cotillion, skinny-dipped their way to jail in the town water tower, disrupted the Shirley Temple look-alike contest, and bonded for life because, as one says, "It's so much fun being a bad girl!"
Siddalee must repair her busted relationship with Vivi by reading a half-century's worth of letters and clippings contained in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood's packet of "Divine Secrets." It's a contrived premise, but the secrets are really fun to learn. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jolie Blon's Bounce'
Dave Robicheaux, the Louisiana cop who's easily one of the most complex and compelling protagonists in mystery fiction, confronts his own demons as well as a brutal adversary who might be the devil himself in this dark thriller. This is classic James Lee Burke, the master stylist, writing at the top of his game:
"I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past... on the tree-flooded alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time (and) all you had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the hairshirt of normalcy."The plot hinges on a pair of murders that don't seem to be connected--a mobbed-up prostitute and a pretty young teenage girl--and the Cajun blues singer accused of both crimes. Robicheaux believes that Tee Bobby Hulin, the gifted musician whose original composition provides the title for this brilliantly realized Gothic crime novel, is innocent. Proving it puts him in the sights of a vicious old overseer named Legion, whose almost supernatural powers nearly drown Robicheaux in the swamp of his own addictions. The narrative proceeds slowly, but Burke's dedicated fans won't begrudge him one beautifully turned phrase, gloriously limned description, or insightful characterization: they just don't get any better than this one. --Jane Adams [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Lesson Before Dying'
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997: In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.
As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Altars Everywhere'
"It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time." So says Sidda, one of the characters inhabiting Little Altars Everywhere. Author Rebecca Wells uses her considerable acting talent to perform this abridgment, adding even more spark to her already lively characters. Everyone--Shep, Vivi, Willetta, and the rest--is given a distinct voice, and Wells plays each of them to the hilt. More like a recording of a one-woman show than a mere reading, Altars is an excellent example of how entertaining audiobooks can be. (Running time: 3 hours, 2 cassettes) --C.B. Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Marie and Bruce: A Play'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monarch Notes on Warren's All the King's Men'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pegasus Descending'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men'
This volume is the first to collect all three dramatic texts and to publish Proud Flesh and Willie Stark. Proud Flesh is particularly fascinating for what it reveals about the development of All the King's Men and Warren's changing perceptions of its characters and themes. The other plays, as post-novel writings, provide a forum for Warren to clarify his intentions in the novel. The editors' introduction to this collection reviews the composition history of the works and their relationship to the novel and to each other.
The new perspectives on Warren's writing presented in Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men": Three Stage Versions provide a glimpse into a creative mind struggling with a compelling story and offer readers another way of looking at this American classic. This book is an essential reference in Warren studies that will give students of All the King's Men another context from which to consider Warren's novel.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Conjura De Los Necios'
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologia y geometria" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces'
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologiÂa y geometriÂa" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Divins Secrets Des Petits Ya-Ya'
"Une danseuse de claquettes maltraite ses enfants". Lorsque Vivi Walker, la soixantaine, découvre dans le prestigieux New York Times le portrait que dresse d'elle sa fille Siddy, metteur en scène de renom, elle la répudie sur le champ. Pour renouer le dialogue et assurer une meilleure compréhension réciproque, ses trois meilleures amies parviennent à la convaincre de confier à sa fille ses carnets secrets sur les Ya-Ya, du nom que les quatre femmes ont attribué dès leur enfance à leur petite tribu. A travers ces fragments du passé, tantôt légers, tantôt tragiques, Siddy est alors amenée à découvrir des aspects méconnus de la personnalité de sa mère, femme pétillante, énergique et exubérante, mais aussi femme blessée par la vie, et que seule l'attention indéfectible de ses amies a réussi à maintenir debout.
Ce livre a séduit des millions de lectrices. L'amitié féminine et les relations aigres-douces entre mères et filles en constituent les principaux thèmes, traités sur un mode jovial et divertissant. --Nathalie Gouiffès [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die göttlichen Geheimnisse der Ya-Ya-Schwestern'
Die vier Mädchen hatten noch Bänder im Haar und Söckchen an, als sie miteinander in Louisiana davon träumten die letzten Überlebenden eines aussterbenden Stammes zu sein -- die Ya-Yas.
Zusammen nahmen sie am Shirley-Temple-Nachwuchs-Wettbewerb teil und brachten nicht nur die Jury mit ihrem ungewöhnlichen Benehmen in Verlegenheit, sie waren auch bei der Welturaufführung ihres späteren Lieblingsfilms Vom Winde verweht anwesend. Mitunter wurde ihr Club zu einem Quartett der Peinlichkeiten, doch die vier standen, was auch kommen mochte, felsenfest zusammen.
Gesammelt hat Vivi ihre Erlebnisse in einem Album, das sie Die göttlichen Geheimnisse der Ya-Ya-Schwestern nannte. Und als sie es, viele Jahre später, ihrer Tochter Sidda zum Lesen gibt, ist ihr Mutter-Tochter-Verhältnis gerade zum Bersten gespannt, denn immerhin hat Sidda in der New York Times bei einem Interview zu ihrem neuen Theaterstück ihre Mutter als "eine Step tanzende, prügelnde Rabenmutter" bezeichnet. Sidda begibt sich auf die schmerzliche Suche nach der Wahrheit, und oft erzählen ihr die fehlenden Personen auf den Fotos mehr als die Bilder selbst.
Rebecca Wells, die selbst auf einer Plantage in Louisiana aufwuchs, schuf mit den Ya-Yas und ihren Kindern ungeheuer quirlige und phantasievolle Frauen, die die größten Sorgen mit einem lauten Lachen und einem Glas Whiskey in der Hand aus der Welt wischen. Und wenn sie sich dann doch nicht ganz beseitigen lassen, sind immer noch drei Ya-Yas da, die sofort als Feuerwehr zur Stelle sind. --Manuela Haselberger [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Sublimi Segreti Delle Ya-Ya'
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