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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bell Jar'
Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bell Jar'
Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frontier Lawmen'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Eyre'
"Jane Eyre" is the story of its title character, a poor orphaned girl who comes to live with her aunt where she endures poor treatment from her aunt and cousins. Jane subsequently ships off to Lowood, a Christian boarding school where she endures more horrible conditions. After some time, life becomes more bearable at Lowood for Jane and she eventually finishes her coursework and spends a period of time as a teacher at the school. After leaving Lowood she comes into the employment of Mr. Rochester as a governess at Thornfield Hall. "Jane Eyre" is the story of one woman's struggle to overcome adversity and a classic love story. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Eyre'
In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'
A guide to reading "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" with a critical and appreciative mind. 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: 'Madness and Civilization'
Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'
"Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity."- Life . An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey 's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. This Viking Critical Library edition is accompanied by essays, discussion topics, a chronology, and a bibliography. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results. With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor and the Madman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor and the Madman: A Tale Of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary'
The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, 70 years in the making, was an intellectually heroic feat with a twist worthy of the greatest mystery fiction: one of its most valuable contributors was a criminally insane American physician, locked up in an English asylum for murder. British stage actor Simon Jones leads us through this uncommon meeting of minds (the other belonging to self-educated dictionary editor James Murray) at full gallop. Ultimately, it's hard to say which is more remarkable: the facts of this amazingly well-researched story, or the sound of author Simon Winchester's erudite prose. Jones's reading smoothly transports listeners to the 19th century, reminding us why so many brilliant people obsessively set out to catalogue the English language. This unabridged version contains an interview between Winchester and John Simpson, editor of the Oxford dictionary. (Running time: 6.5 hours, 6 cassettes) --Lou Schuler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary'
The making of the "Oxford English Dictionary" was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the "OED's" editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wide Sargasso Sea'
In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."
The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."
Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White [via]
Odyssey, The: The World's Great Classics, by Homer; tr. by S.H. Butcher and Andrew Lang [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories'
One of 60 low-priced classic texts published to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary. All the titles are extracts from "Penguin Classics" titles. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition'
This is a critical edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper", the story of the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed and mistreated, leaving her to face insanity alone. It is accompanied by contemporary reviews and letters. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings'
"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver."--Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a leading figure in the women's movement of the early twentieth century, is a pillar of the American feminist canon. This edition of her work includes her best-known story, "The Yellow Wall-paper," a terrifying tale about a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the "rest cure" she is ordered to follow by her doctor to relieve her postpartum depression. Also included is a wide range of other short stories; an abridged version of her little-known but brilliant utopian novel, Herland, about a peaceful all-female world; and selections from her landmark treatise, Women and Economics, first published in 1898 to universal acclaim. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition'
Scholars have argued for decades over which constitutes the best possible version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's much-anthologized story The Yellow Wall-Paper. Most editions have been based on the1892 New England Magazine publication rather than the handwritten manuscript at Radcliffe College. Publication of the unedited manuscript in 1994 sparked controversy over which of the two was definitive. Since then, scholars have discovered half a dozen parent texts for later twentieth-century printings, including William Dean Howells' version from 1920 and the 1933 Golden Book version. While traditional critical editions gather evidence and make an argument for adopting one text as preferable to others, "This volume offers both Gilman scholars and scholars of textual studies a unique and helpful means of engaging with a work that exists in multiple forms, and includes some insightful new readings of this much-analyzed story," saus Charlotte Rich, editor of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Newsletter. Shawn St. Jean's The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition offers instead both manuscript and magazine, critically edited and printed in parallel for the first time. When viewed as part of a process beginning with writing and ending with bibliographic coding, new significance appears in such facets as the magazine's accompanying illustrations, its lineation and paragraphing, Gilman's choice of minor pronouns, and her original handwritten ending. This critical edition of The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman includes a full and nontraditional apparatus for ease of use by students and scholars to study the more than 400 variants between the two. Four new essays, written especially for this volume, explore the implications of this multitext model. Shawn St.Jean, an independent scholar in Brockport, New York, has previously published on Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Studies in Bibliography, Feminist Studies, and Studies in Short Fiction. He is the author of Pagan Dreiser: Songs from American Mythology. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ancho Mar De Los Sargazos / Wide Sargosso Sea'
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