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› Find signed collectible books: '2061: Odyssey Three'
Arthur C. Clark, creator of one of the world's best-loved science fiction tales, revisits the most famous future ever imagined in this NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, as two expeditions into space become inextricably tangled. Heywood Floyd, survivor of two previous encounters with the mysterious monloiths, must again confront Dave Bowman, HAL, and an alien race that has decided that Mankind is to play a part in the evolution of the galaxy whether it wishes to or not. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Accidental Tourist'
"POIGNANT . . . FUNNY . . . THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST IS ONE OF HER BEST. . . . [TYLER] HAS NEVER BEEN STRONGER." - The New York Times Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon's insular world-and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life. "BITTERSWEET . . . EVOCATIVE . . . It's easy to forget this is the warm lull of fiction; you half-expect to run into her characters at the dry cleaners . . . Tyler [is] a writer of great compassion." - The Boston Globe "Tyler has given us an endlessly diverting book whose strength gathers gradually to become a genuinely thrilling one." - Los Angeles Times "A DELIGHT . . . A GRACEFUL COMIC NOVEL ABOUT GETTING THROUGH LIFE." - The Wall Street Journal [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Accidental Tourist and Ladder of Years'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All Creatures Great and Small'
"This book shines with humor, pathos, superb tale-telling and a rarity above all these, what seems a richly justified love of life. whether on his back in a much-filled stable with his arm inside a cow, trying to turn a calf into the proper position to be born, or calming a wealty dowager with an overfed Peckingses, or comforting a lonely old man companion -a dog -has died, James Herriot needed all the bedside manner, stamina, skill, and gift of humanity of the best of family doctors. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Asterix the Gaul'
What is the secret of the Gauls' amazing strength? A Roman spy is sent to find out and returns with the incredible news - the Gauls have a magic potion. Now all the Romans need to do is get the recipe. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Before and After'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bicentennial Man and Other Stories'
Market Power explores society and economy in medieval Iberia, examining the intersection of regional commercial interests, lordship, and royal authority as part of the evolution of a small village into a rural market town. This analysis of notarial registers from Santa Coloma de Queralt addresses significant themes in medieval history, such as the market economy, commerce and credit, and the interactions of businessmen across religious boundaries. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood Work'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brideshead Revisited'
A departure from Evelyn Waugh's normally comic theater, Brideshead Revisited concerns the tale of Charles Ryder, a captain in the British Army in post-World War I England. Unlike Waugh's previous narrators, Ryder is an intelligent man, looking back on much of his life from his current post in Oxford. He strikes a special friendship with Lord Sebastian Flyte as the setting moves to the Brideshead estate and a baroque castle that recalls England's prior standing in the world. Ryder falls for Flyte's sister while families, politics and religions collide. What makes the book extraordinary is Waugh's sharp, vivid style and his use of dialect and minor characters. This is one of Waugh's finest accomplishments and a superb book. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Catcher in the Rye'
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme ? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Day of the Triffids'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz'
In this edition, Dorothy and the Wizard are sucked into the center of the Earth. Together they make their way back to Oz, dodging grim perils on a hazard-filled journey. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Far from the Madding Crowd'
Set in his fictional Wessex countryside in southwest England, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's breakthrough work. Though it was first published anonymously in 1874, the quick and tremendous success of Far from the Madding Crowd persuaded Hardy to give up his first profession, architecture, to concentrate on writing fiction. The story of the ill-fated passions of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors offers a spectacle of country life brimming with an energy and charm not customarily associated with Hardy. ("When Farmer Oak smiled, " the novel begins, "the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears. . . .")
----The text is based on the authoritative Wessex Edition of 1912, revised and corrected by Hardy himself.
----This edition is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS. It stars Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba Everdene, Nathaniel Parker as Gabriel Oak, Nigel Terry as Mr. Boldwood, and Jonathan Firth as Frank Troy. Adapted by Philomena
McDonagh, Far from the Madding Crowd is directed by Nick Renton.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesignedthe series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flight of the Intruder'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fluke'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'French Lieutenant's Woman'
The story of a woman wronged, set against a backdrop of an unrelenting Victorian England. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Train Robbery'
"A nineteenth-century version of THE STING...Crichton fascinates us."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side, Edward Pierce charms the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of the century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who could predict the consequences of making the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive? Based on fact, as lively as legend, and studded with all the suspense and style of a modern fiction master, here is a classic caper novel set a decade before the age of dynamite--yet nonetheless explosive.... [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hamlet'
Undoubtedly the most famous of all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet remains one of the most enduring but also enigmatic pieces of western literature. The story of Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark, his tortured relationship with his mother, and his quest to avenge his father's murder at the hand of his brother Claudius has fascinated writers and audiences ever since it was written around 1600.
For many years interest focused on both Hamlet's inability to avenge his father's death, claiming that "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", and, according to none other than Freud, his oedipal fixation with his mother. However, more recently critics have turned their attention to Hamlet's bold theatrical self-reflexivity (most famously reflected in the performance of "The Mousetrap"), its fascination with issues of theology and Renaissance humanism, and its dense, complex poetic language. What is so remarkable about the play is the way in which it tends to uncannily reflect the concerns of different epochs. As a result, Hamlet has been at different moments defined as a romantic rebel, an angst-ridden existentialist, a paralysed intellectual and an ambivalent New Man. Whatever subsequent generations make of Hamlet, they are unlikely to exhaust the possibilities of this most extraordinary play. --Jerry Brotton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Handful of Dust'
"All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent."
Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as Evelyn Waugh, who employed the conventions of the comic novel to chip away at the already crumbling English class system. His 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, is a sublime example of his bleak satirical style: a mordantly funny exposé of aristocratic decadence and ennui in England between the wars.
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. In the first half of the novel Waugh fearlessly anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Everyone moves through an endless cycle of parties and country-house weekends, being scrupulously polite in public and utterly horrid in private. Sex is something one does to relieve the boredom, and Brenda's affair provides a welcome subject for conversation:
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.Tony's indifference and Brenda's selfishness give their relationship a sort of equilibrium until tragedy forces them to face facts. The collapse of their relationship accelerates, and in the famous final section of the book Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado, throwing himself on the mercy of a jungle only slightly more savage than the one he leaves behind in England. For all its biting wit, A Handful of Dust paints a bleak picture of the English upper classes, reaching beyond satire toward a very modern sense of despair. In Waugh's world, culture, breeding, and the trappings of civilization only provide more subtle means of destruction. --Simon Leake [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hell House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How to Make an American Quilt'
"Remarkable...An affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinay and moving reading experience, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves.
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE COMING OUT FALL 1995
-- with Maya Angelou, Winona Ryder, and Rip Torn [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I Am Legend'
One of the most influential vampire novels of the 20th century, I Am Legend regularly appears on the "10 Best" lists of numerous critical studies of the horror genre. As Richard Matheson's third novel, it was first marketed as science fiction (for although written in 1954, the story takes place in a future 1976). A terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive have been transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Except, that is, for Robert Neville. He alone appears to be immune to this disease, but the grim irony is that now he is the outsider. He is the legendary monster who must be destroyed because he is different from everyone else. Employing a stark, almost documentary style, Richard Matheson was one of the first writers to convince us that the undead can lurk in a local supermarket freezer as well as a remote Gothic castle. His influence on a generation of bestselling authors--including Stephen King and Dean Koontz--who first read him in their youth is, well, legendary. --Stanley Wiater [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I, Robot'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Incredible Journey'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inherit the Wind'
One of the most moving and meaningful plays in American theatre--based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was tried for teaching evolution--now on Broadway starring Tony Award® Winners Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, and Directed by Tony Award® Winner Doug Hughes
The accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat, they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every American.
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . . . Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . Were still arguing this caseall the way to the White House.
Chicago Tribune
Powerful . . . a crackling good courtroom play . . . [that] provides two of the juiciest roles in American theater.
Copley News Service
[This] historical drama . . . deserves respect.
The Columbus Dispatch [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ipcress File'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: A Longman Cultural Edition'
Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.
Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Julius Caesar'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'King Rat'
Set in Changi, the most notorious prisoner of war camp in Asia, "King Rat" is a heroic story of survival told by a master story-teller who lived through those years as a young soldier. Only one man in fifteen had the strength, the luck, and the cleverness simply to survive Changi. And then there was King. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kiss the Girls'
In Los Angeles, a reporter investigating a series of murders is killed. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a beautiful medical intern suddenly disappears. Washington D.C.Us Alex Cross is back to solve the most baffling and terrifying murder case ever. Two clever pattern killers are collaborating, cooperating, competing--and they are working coast to coast. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Unicorn'
The Last Unicorn is one of the true classics of fantasy, ranking with Tolkien's The Hobbit, Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Beagle writes a shimmering prose-poetry, the voice of fairy tales and childhood:
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
The unicorn discovers that she is the last unicorn in the world, and sets off to find the others. She meets Schmendrick the Magician--whose magic seldom works, and never as he intended--when he rescues her from Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, where only some of the mythical beasts displayed are illusions. They are joined by Molly Grue, who believes in legends despite her experiences with a Robin Hood wannabe and his unmerry men. Ahead wait King Haggard and his Red Bull, who banished unicorns from the land.
This is a book no fantasy reader should miss; Beagle argues brilliantly the need for magic in our lives and the folly of forgetting to dream. --Nona Vero [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Long Goodbye'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Loved One'
The prolific Waugh--an English novelist and satirist perhaps best known for Brideshead Revisited--described this slim, vicious comedy as "a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood." The setting is the L.A. funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. (At Whispering Glades, staff must refer to the corpses only as "Loved Ones.") The industry provides a perfect foil for Waugh's deadpan wit--and an apt metaphor for the movie business. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Machine Gunners'
Chas McGill had the second-best collection of war souvenirs in Garmouth - second only to Boddser Brown. But then again, Boddser Brown is pretty unscrupulous and will steal flying-helmets from the heads of dead German pilots. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Fell to Earth'
T.J. Newton is an extraterrestrial who goes to Earth on a desperate mission of mercy. But instead of aid, Newton discovers loneliness and despair that ultimately ends in tragedy. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Marathon Man'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Milagro Beanfield War : A Novel'
Joe Mondragon, thirty-six, is a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, who slammed his battered pickup to a stop one day, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into an arid patch of ground. Then, illegally, he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began John Nichols' classic tale of the little guy against the big guy -- THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Milagro Beanfield War'
Joe Mondragon, thirty-six, is a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, who slammed his battered pickup to a stop one day, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into an arid patch of ground. Then, illegally, he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began John Nichols' classic tale of the little guy against the big guy -- THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nanny Diaries'
WANTED:One young woman to take care of four-year-old boy. Must be cheerful, enthusiastic, and selfless--bordering on masochistic. Must relish sixteen-hour shifts with a deliberately nap-deprived preschooler. Must love geting thrown up on, literally and figuratively, by everyone in his family. Must enjoy the delicious anticipation of ridiculously erratic pay. Mostly, must love being treated like fungus found growing out of employer's Hermes bag. Those who take it personally need not apply. Who wouldn't want this job? Struggling to graduate from NYU and afford her microscopic studio apartment, Nanny takes a position caring for the only son of the wealthy X family. She rapidly learns the insane amount of juggling involved to ensure that a Park Avenue wife, who doesn't work, cook, clean, or raise her own child, has a smooth day.When the X's marriage begins to disintegrate, Nanny ends up involved way beyond the bounds of human decency or good taste. Her tenure with the X family becomes a nearly impossible mission to maintain the mental health of their four-year-old, her own integrity, and, most important, her sense of humor. Over nine tense months, Mrs. X and Nanny perform the age-old dance of decorum and power as they test the limits of modern-day servitude. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Never Cry Wolf'
More than a half-century ago the Canadian Wildlife Service assigned the naturalist Farley Mowat to investigate why wolves were killing arctic caribou. Mowat's account of the summer he lived in the frozen tundra alone-studying the wolf population and developing a deep affection for the wolves (who were of no threat to caribou or man) and for a friendly Inuit tribe known as the Ihalmiut ("People of the Deer")-is a work that has become cherished by generations of readers, an indelible record of the myths and magic of wild wolves. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Beach'
"The most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off."
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
They are the last generation, the innocent victims of an accidental war, living out their last days, making do with what they have, hoping for a miracle. As the deadly rain moves ever closer, the world as we know it winds toward an inevitable end.... [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Othello'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pale Horse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from contemporary Critical Perspective'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Power of One'
The Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.
The New York Times
Unabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independencethe power of onecan prevail.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreamswhich are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him. He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives, and the power of one.
Totally engrossing . . . [presents] the metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others . . . Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Marvelous . . . It is the people of the sun-baked plains of Africa who tug at the heartstrings in this book. . . . [Bryce] Courtenay draws them all with a fierce and violent love.
The Washington Post Book World
Impressive.
Newsday
A compelling tale.
The Christian Science Monitor [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Rising Sun'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Robot Trilogy : The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Scold's Bride'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Seabiscuit: An American Legend'
He didn't look like much. With his smallish stature, knobby knees, and slightly crooked forelegs, he looked more like a cow pony than a thoroughbred. But looks aren't everything; his quality, an admirer once wrote, "was mostly in his heart." Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of the horse who became a cultural icon in Seabiscuit: An American Legend.
Seabiscuit rose to prominence with the help of an unlikely triumvirate: owner Charles Howard, an automobile baron who once declared that "the day of the horse is past"; trainer Tom Smith, a man who "had cultivated an almost mystical communication with horses"; and jockey Red Pollard, who was down on his luck when he charmed a then-surly horse with his calm demeanor and a sugar cube. Hillenbrand details the ups and downs of "team Seabiscuit," from early training sessions to record-breaking victories, and from serious injury to "Horse of the Year"--as well as the Biscuit's fabled rivalry with War Admiral. She also describes the world of horseracing in the 1930s, from the snobbery of Eastern journalists regarding Western horses and public fascination with the great thoroughbreds to the jockeys' torturous weight-loss regimens, including saunas in rubber suits, strong purgatives, even tapeworms.
Along the way, Hillenbrand paints wonderful images: tears in Tom Smith's eyes as his hero, legendary trainer James Fitzsimmons, asked to hold Seabiscuit's bridle while the horse was saddled; critically injured Red Pollard, whose chest was crushed in a racing accident a few weeks before, listening to the San Antonio Handicap from his hospital bed, cheering "Get going, Biscuit! Get 'em, you old devil!"; Seabiscuit happily posing for photographers for several minutes on end; other horses refusing to work out with Seabiscuit because he teased and taunted them with his blistering speed.
Though sometimes her prose takes on a distinctly purple hue ("His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow"; "The California sunlight had the pewter cast of a declining season"), Hillenbrand has crafted a delightful book. Wire to wire, Seabiscuit is a winner. Highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shell Seekers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ship of Fools'
The story takes place in the summer of 1931, on board a cruise ship bound for Germany. Passengers include a Spanish noblewoman, a drunken German lawyer, an American divorcee, a pair of Mexican Catholic priests. This ship of fools is a crucible of intense experience, out of which everyone emerges forever changed. Rich in incident, passion, and treachery, the novel explores themes of nationalism, cultural and ethnic pride, and basic human frailty that are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published in 1962. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Simple Plan'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Slipping-down Life'
"Without Anne Tyler, American fiction would be an immeasurably bleaker place."
NEWSDAY
Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell--and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real....
From the Paperback edition. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sparkling Cyanide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Starter for Ten: A Novel'
Now a major motion picture
Utterly charming . . . a big-hearted, flawless coming-of-age tale, as scary and funny as your yearbook picture.
People (****/Critics Choice)
The year is 1985. Brian Jackson, a working-class kid on full scholarship, has started his first term at university. He has a dark secreta long-held, burning ambition to appear on the wildly popular British TV quiz show University Challengeand now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. Hes made the school team, and theyve completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match. (And, whats more, hes fallen head over heels for one of his teammates, the beautiful, brainy, and intimidatingly posh Alice Harbinson.) Life seems perfect and triumph inevitablebut as his world opens up, Brian learns that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Fresh, edgy and very funny . . . [Nicholls] has a talent for droll dialogue and a wonderful sense of the ridiculous.
USA Today
Starter for Ten has that elusive Hornby-factor. . . . Its wincingly funny . . . a prospect to savour.
Arena [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Story of O'
Dust jacket notes: "Travel to the most secret corners of the human psyche...to a perverse world of dark passion...twisted seduction, amourous betrayal and blood lust. this modern classic, from the mysterious woman writer whose name will forever be remembered for sexual humiliation mixed with love, is 'a total, authentic literary experience' (The New York Times). First published in France in 1954, Story of O is a tale of a woman willing to subject her mind and her body to the strange torments and tortures conceived by her lover. O's erotic journey begins when her lover brings her to a small chateau in the country...a place where any man can have her...a place where she learns total obedience. This is a shocking and disturbing erotic masterpiece." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Taming of the Shrew'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tarzan of the Apes'
First published in 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs's romance has lost little of its force over the years--as film revivals and TV series well attest. Tarzan of the Apes is very much a product of its age: replete with bloodthirsty natives and a bulky, swooning American Negress, and haunted by what zoo specialists now call charismatic megafauna (great beasts snarling, roaring, and stalking, most of whom would be out of place in a real African jungle). Burroughs countervails such incorrectness, however, with some rather unattractive representations of white civilization--mutinous, murderous sailors, effete aristos, self-involved academics, and hard-hearted cowards. At Tarzan's heart rightly lies the resourceful and hunky title character, a man increasingly torn between the civil and the savage, for whom cutlery will never be less than a nightmare.
The passages in which the nut-brown boy teaches himself to read and write are masterly and among the book's improbable, imaginative best. How tempting it is to adopt the ten-year-old's term for letters--"little bugs"! And the older Tarzan's realization that civilized "men were indeed more foolish and more cruel than the beasts of the jungle," while not exactly a new notion, is nonetheless potent. The first in Burroughs's serial is most enjoyable in its resounding oddities of word and thought, including the unforgettable "When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled; and smiles are the foundation of beauty." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'
Tess is a young country girl from a decayed aristocratic family who suffers ravishment at the hands of a nouveau riche cad. The confession of her misfortune to her husband, a sanctimonious Anglican, blights her marriage and leads to her downfall. A critical introduction accompanies the text. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Town Like Alice'
A TOWN LIKE ALICE tells of a young woman who miraculously survived a Japanese "death march" in World War II, and of an Australian soldier, also a prisoner of war, who offered to help her--even at the cost of his life.... [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tragedy of Julius Caesar'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Trial'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Shakespeare's Hamlet: Prince Of Denmark'
| From Longman's new Cultural Edition series, Hamlet, edited by Constance Jordan, includes the play and contextual materials from the era of Shakespeare.
This edition represents Shakespeare's text as it appears in the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623, and it supplies students with useful footnotes to the interpretation of the text. It also includes brief samples of works by Shakespeare's contemporaries in a section entitled Contexts; which will help students understand the historical setting and cultural ideas that helped shape the meaning of Shakespeare's play. By listening to these voices from the past, students can approach the play with some knowledge of why Hamlet asks the questions he does and of why the character himself, the creation of a distant century, also seems so much a part of our own world.
The Longman Cultural Edition series is composed of teaching texts edited by prominent scholars. In addition to the recently published Cultural Editions Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, and Othello, titles in the series for this year include Dickens' Hard Times, Beowulf, and Oscar Wilde'sThe Picture of Dorian Gray. |
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'
From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Hamlet, edited by Constance Jordan, includes the play and contextual materials from the era of Shakespeare. This edition represents Shakespeare's text as it appears in the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623, and it supplies readers with useful footnotes to the interpretation of the text. It also includes brief samples of works by Shakespeare's contemporaries in a section entitled Contexts; these will help readers to understand the historical setting and the cultural ideas that helped shape the meaning of Shakespeare's play. By listening to these voices from the past, readers can approach the play with some knowledge of why Hamlet asks the questions he does and of why the character himself, the creation of a distant century, also seems so much a part of our own world. Readers interested in Shakespeare's Plays and the time they were written Jordan Hamlet SMP.doc Page 1 of 1 [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice'
From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Othello, edited by prominent Shakespearean scholar Clare Carroll, includes Othello, Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry, and source materials on early modern ethnography and on women and gender. Longman Cultural Editions are a new series of teaching texts edited by prominent scholars. In addition to Othello, the second volume offer Frankenstein, with selections from Mary Shelley's journals and contextual materials on Romantic images of Satan. Other titles offered in the series include Dickens' Hard Times, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Future titles will include Shakespeare's King Lear and Beowulf. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Year of Living Dangerously'
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