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books tagged “metafiction”
books tagged “metafiction”
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Angle of Reposeby Wallace StegnerISBN 0679603387 (0-679-60338-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angle of Repose'Book summary:Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.
"Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel," wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. "[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is 'historical,' an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike re-creation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction."
"Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything--about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future. . . . It reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers' feet beat dusty."
--Wallace Stegner [via]More editions of Angle of Repose:
The Arabian Knightsby Rene BullISBN 0685168646 (0-685-16864-6)
Hardcover, Random House Value Pub
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Arabian Nightsby Husain Haddawy, Muhsin Mahdi, Mahdi MushinISBN 0679413383 (0-679-41338-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Arabian Nights'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
These stories (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories), told by the Princess Shahrazad under the threat of death if she ceases to amuse, first reached the West around 1700. They fired in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables, and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi tales, the stories of The Arabian Nights provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory.
The present new translation by Husain Haddawy is of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and is considered to be the most authentic. This early version is without the embellishments and additions that appear in later Indian and Egyptian manuscripts, on which all previous English translations were based. [via]More editions of Arabian Nights:
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The Arabian Nightsby Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, Nora A. Smith, Maxfield ParrishISBN 0684195895 (0-684-19589-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Arabian Nights'Book summary:For nearly a century, Scribner has exemplified the very best in publishing by pairing classic texts with the illustrative giants of the time, such as N. C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. With the same commitment to the high standards established by the series' founders, Atheneum Books for Young Readers is expanding the Scribner Illustrated Classics line over the next several years to include such modern-day classics as Jack London's The Call of the Wild and White Fang, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and The Stories of O. Henry, to be illustrated by some of the finest artists of our generation, including Wendell Minor, Ed Young, and Trina Schart Hyman. [via]
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The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Nightby Bennett Alfred Cerf, Richard Francis BurtonISBN 0679602356 (0-679-60235-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night'Book summary:Full of mischief and valor, ribaldry and romance, The Arabian Nights is a work that has enthralled readers for centuries. The text presented here is that of the 1932 Modern Library edition for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the "most famous and representative" of the stories from the multivolume translation of Richard F. Burton.
The origins of The Arabian Nights are obscure. About a thousand years ago a vast number of stories in Arabic from various countries began to be brought together; only much later was the collection called The Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights. All the stories are told by Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who entertains her husband, King Shahryar, whose custom it was to execute his wives after a single night. Shahrazad begins a story each night but withholds the ending until the following night, thus postponing her execution.
This selection includes many of the stories that are universally known though seldom read in this authentic form:
"Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp," "Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." These, and the tales that accompany them, make delightful reading, demonstrating, as the Modern Library noted in 1932, that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken. [via]More editions of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night:
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Bam Bam Bamby Eve Merriam, Dan YaccarinoISBN 080505796X (0-8050-5796-X)
Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bam Bam Bam'Book summary:An exuberant celebration of construction and the noise and confusion that accompany it.[via]More editions of Bam Bam Bam:
Best Selections from the Arabian Nights Entertainmentsby Edward William Lane, Edward Stanley Poole, William HarveyISBN 0805502440 (0-8055-0244-0)
Hardcover, Hart Pub Co
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Black Princeby Iris MurdochISBN 0701119241 (0-7011-1924-1)
Hardcover, Chatto and Windus
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Prince'Book summary:A novel in which an elderly writer with a block, surrounded by predatory friends and relations, seeks to escape, but his failure to do so and its aftermath lead to a violent climax. From the author of THE SEA, THE SEA and THE BELL. [via]
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The Book of Laughter and Forgettingby Milan Kundera, Aaron AsherISBN 0809592010 (0-8095-9201-0)
Hardcover, Wildside Pr
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The Breastby Philip RothISBN 0679749012 (0-679-74901-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Briar Roseby Robert CooverISBN 0802135412 (0-8021-3541-2)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Briar Rose'Book summary:Robert Coover's many acclaimed works of fiction have established him as a powerhouse among America's postmodernist writers. With Briar Rose, he casts his own unmistakable style on an ageless tale. A brilliant recreation of the timeless Sleeping Beauty story, Briar Rose tells of a prince trapped in the briars; a sleeping beauty who cannot awaken, dreaming of a succession of kissing princes; and the old spell-casting fairy who inhabits the princess's dreams, regaling her with legends of other sleeping beauties and trying to imagine the nature of human desire. [via]
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Canterbury Talesby Geoffrey Chaucer, Barbara CohenISBN 0688062016 (0-688-06201-6)
Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Canterbury Tales'Book summary:On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.
From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]
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- Canterbury Tales: ISBN 080850861X (0-8085-0861-X)
Hardcover, Bt Bound - The Canterbury Tales: ISBN 0679601252 (0-679-60125-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group - Canterbury Tales: ISBN 0713910046 (0-7139-1004-6)
Hardcover, Allen Lane - Canterbury Tales: ISBN 0719114853 (0-7191-1485-3)
Hardcover, Cornmarket Reprints in association with Magdalene College - Canterbury Tales: ISBN 0688062016 (0-688-06201-6)
Hardcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
- Canterbury Tales: ISBN 080850861X (0-8085-0861-X)
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Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer 1904by Geoffrey Chaucer, Percy MackayeISBN 0766171779 (0-7661-7177-9)
Softcover, Kessinger Pub Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer 1904'Book summary:The illustrious work of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, are presented herein as a modern rendering into prose of the Prologue and ten tales. The barrier of obsolete speech is the occasion for this rendering of the Canterbury Tales in English, easily intelligible today. Mr. Mackaye presents a representative portion of Chaucer's unfinished masterpiece in such a form as shall best preserve for a modern reader the substance and style of the original. Handsomely illustrated. [via]
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Civil War Land in Bad Decline : Stories and a Novellaby George SaundersISBN 0679448128 (0-679-44812-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiographyby Chuck BarrisISBN 0786888083 (0-7868-8808-3)
Softcover, Hyperion Books
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The Dark Towerby Stephen King, Michael WhelanISBN 0743254562 (0-7432-5456-2)
Softcover, Scribner
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dark Tower'Book summary:At one point in this final book of the Dark Tower series>, the character Stephen King (added to the plot in Song of Susannah) looks back at the preceding pages and says "when this last book is published, the readers are going to be just wild." And he's not kidding.
After a journey through seven books and over 20 years, King's Constant Readers finally have the conclusion they've been both eagerly awaiting and silently dread ing. The tension in the Dark Tower series has built steadily from the beginning and, like in the best of King's novels, explodes into a violent, heart-tugging climax as Roland and his ka-tet finally near their goal. The body count in The Dark Tower is high. The gunslingers come out shooting and face a host of enemies, including low men, mutants, vampires, Roland's hideous quasi-offspring Mordred, and the fearsome Crimson King himself. King pushes the gross-out factor at times--Roland's lesson on tanning (no, not sun tanning) is brutal--but the magic of the series remains strong and readers will feel the pull of the Tower as strongly as ever as the story draws to a close. During this sentimental journey, King ties up loose ends left hanging from the 15 nonseries novels and stories that are deeply entwined in the fabric of Mid-World through characters like Randall Flagg (The Stand and others) or Father Callahan (Salem's Lot). When it finally arrives, the long-awaited conclusion will leave King's myriad fans satisfied but wishing there were still more to come.
In King's memoir On Writing, he tells of an old woman who wrote him after reading the early books in the Dark Tower series. She was dying, she said, and didn't expect to see the end of Roland's quest. Could King tell her? Does he reach the Tower? Does he save it? Sadly, King said he did not know himself, that the story was creating itself as it went along. Wherever that woman is now (the clearing at the end of the path, perhaps?), let's hope she has a copy of The Dark Tower. Surely she would agree it's been worth the wait. --Benjamin Reese
A King and His Tower
Over 30 years in the making, spanning seven volumes, Stephen King's epic quest for the Dark Tower has encompassed almost his entire body of fiction. Amazon.com editor Ben Reese caught up with King to chat about the then-unpublished volumes of his Dark Tower series, rumors of his retirement, and the horrors of genre classification. Authors on Stephen King
Mystery writer Michael Connelly thinks Stephen King's "one of the most generous writers I know of." Thriller author Ridley Pearson says, "King possesses an incredible sense of story..." Read our Stephen King testimonials to find out what else they and other authors had to say about the undisputed King of Horror.The Path to the Dark Tower
There are only seven volumes in Stephen King's Dark Tower series but more than a dozen of his novels and short stories are deeply entwined with the Mid-World universe. Take a look at the nonseries titles, from Salem's Lot to Everything's Eventual. Can you find the connections? History of an Alternate Universe
Robin Furth, an expert on Stephen King's Dark Tower universe if ever there was one, has created a timeline of Mid-World, the slowly crumbling world of gunslinger Roland Deschain. Read it and get up to speed on a world of adventure.Hail to the King
Fans applauded and critics howled when Stephen King was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Service to American Letters. In typical fashion, King accepted the honor with humility and urged recognition for other "popular" authors. Listen to a clip of his acceptance speech, then order the entire speech on audio CD. [via]More editions of The Dark Tower:
Descent into Hellby Charles WilliamsISBN 0802812201 (0-8028-1220-1)
Softcover, Eerdmans Pub Co
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Don Delilloby Harold BloomISBN 079107031X (0-7910-7031-X)
Hardcover, Facts on File
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don Delillo'Book summary:Harold Bloom suggests Don DeLillo's work holds a proleptic sense of the triumph of terror. This text offers critical views on numerous DeLillo novels, including The Names, Mao II, Libra, White Noise, and Underworld. This edition of Bloom's Major Novelists will help any student delve into the work of this contemporary writer.
This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School; preeminent literary critic of our time. Titles include detailed plot summaries of the novel, extracts from scholarly critical essays on the novels, a complete bibliography of the writer's novels, and more. [via]
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Don Delillo's White Noiseby Harold Bloom, Jesse ZubaISBN 0791070441 (0-7910-7044-1)
Hardcover, Facts on File
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Einstein's Dreamsby Alan LightmanISBN 0679416463 (0-679-41646-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Empire of the Senselessby Kathy AckerISBN 0802131794 (0-8021-3179-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire of the Senseless'Book summary:Acker continues her post-modern explorations with a story set in a bleak world where the society we know is dying in its own ruins.[via]More editions of Empire of the Senseless:
The Fermataby Nicholson BakerISBN 0679759336 (0-679-75933-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fermata'Book summary:The Fermata is the most risky of Nicholson Baker's emotional histories. His narrator, Arno Strine, is a 35-year-old office temp who is writing his autobiography. "It's harder than I thought!" he admits. His "Fold-powers" are easier; he can stop the world and use it as his own pleasure ground. Arno uses this gift not for evil or material gain (he would feel guilty about stealing), though he does undress a good number of women and momentarily place them in compromising positions--always, in his view, with respect and love. Anyone who can stop time and refer in self-delight to his "chronanisms" can't be all bad! Like Baker's other books, The Fermata gains little from synopsis. The pleasure is literally in the text. What's memorable is less the sex and the sex toys (including the "Monasticon," in the shape of a monk holding a vibrating manuscript) than Arno's wistful recollections of intimacy: the noise, for instance, of his ex-girlfriend's nail clipper, "which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong." [via]
The Fifth Head of Cerberusby Gene WolfeISBN 0684128306 (0-684-12830-6)
Hardcover, Washington Ave Books Inc
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Flight to Canadaby Ishmael ReedISBN 0684847507 (0-684-84750-7)
Softcover, Scribner
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From the Realm of Morpheusby Steven MillhauserISBN 0688065015 (0-688-06501-5)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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The Giftby Vladimir Nabokov, Michael ScammelISBN 0679727256 (0-679-72725-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gift'Book summary:For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. It's a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. This hyphenated creation has more than a few things in common with the author, despite Nabokov's vehement denial in the novel's foreword. Still, only a nitwit would read The Gift for its autobiographical revelations. What this early masterpiece does offer is a wealth of lyrical, witty, heartbreaking prose, beautifully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell (with an assist from Nabokov himself). Who else would note the way a street rises "at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel"? Who else has ever administered the satirical shiv to his characters with such deadly, almost affectionate aplomb?
Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes--which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.
Of course, only a fraction of The Gift is taken up with this sort of demolition derby. Fyodor's romance with Zina, for example, occasions the most ardent prose of Nabokov's career: "And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (Shades of Volodya and Véra? Only the deceased husband and wife, and perhaps Stacy Schiff, know for sure.)At the same time, The Gift is a brilliant, mesmerizing riff on the history of Russian literature, with elaborate bouquets tossed to Pushkin and Gogol. There's also a hilarious yet somehow tender evisceration of the do-gooding polemicist Nikolai Chernyshevski--which was suppressed, in fact, when the novel was originally serialized by a Russian émigré magazine. As should be clear by now, The Gift defies any attempt at quick-and-dirty summary. But the book plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with our stuffy notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. And as Nabokov repeatedly wraps the reader's consciousness around his little finger, he never holds back on that ultimate literary gift: pleasure. --James Marcus [via]
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The Gift of Stonesby Jim CraceISBN 0684190702 (0-684-19070-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Gould's Book of Fishby Richard FlanaganISBN 0802139590 (0-8021-3959-0)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gould's Book of Fish'Book summary:Gould's Book of Fish, an extraordinary work of fact-based fiction by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) is a journey through the fringe madness of Down Under colonialism. Set during the 1830s in a hellish island prison colony off the Tasmanian coast, the novel plucks a real-life thief and prisoner, English forger William Buelow Gould, from the pages of history to act as protagonist-narrator. Through Gould's unique capacity to blend hyperbole, hyperrealism, and self-effacing honesty, the reader acquires a shockingly clear picture of daily torment on the island. Yet more remarkable is Gould's portrait of bizarre ambitions among prison authorities to further principles of art and science amidst so much misery. Key to such plans is Gould's talent as a painter and illustrator. The compound's surgeon, nursing hopes of publishing a definitive guide to the island's fish, leans heavily on Gould's ability to record the taxonomy of various species. Though Gould accommodates his masters, the manuscript, in his hands, becomes testimony to their perverse dreams of civilization and his own quick-witted survival instincts. Throughout, Flanagan never loses the well-imagined voice of Gould's candor or the character's dense descriptive powers, talents that translate into a thrilling text that reads like a blend of Melville and Burgess. --Tom Keogh [via]
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The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Worldby Haruki Murakami, Alfred BirnbaumISBN 0679743464 (0-679-74346-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'Book summary:Japan's most widely-read and controversial writer, author of A Wild Sheep Chase, hurtles into the consciousness of the West with this narrative about a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters--not to mention Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall. [via]
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Heart of Darknessby Joseph ConradISBN 0679428011 (0-679-42801-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heart of Darkness'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Heart of Darkness grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power.
Apparently a sailors yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. Heart of Darkness is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul. [via] 
I Believe in Unicornsby Michael Morpurgo, Gary BlytheISBN 0763630500 (0-7636-3050-0)
Hardcover, Candlewick Pr
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The Informationby Martin AmisISBN 0679735739 (0-679-73573-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Information'Book summary:Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal--they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is the plot the demise of Barry.
"With The Information, Amis delivers a portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anyone] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities."--Houston Chronicle [via]More editions of The Information:
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Inkheartby Cornelia Funke, Anthea BellISBN 0786280417 (0-7862-8041-7)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inkheart'Book summary:Some books are destined to be lifelong treasured possessions. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, the bestselling German author of The Thief Lord, could easily lay claim to being such a book. It is a meaty, magical adventure that oozes a passion for books and the awesome power of words on a page, written by an author who clearly adores stories. Every chapter is introduced by tempting quotations from classic novels that whet your appetite for more and help underline the terrific heritage of children's literature that Inkheart is added to.
Meggie is the daughter of a revered bookbinder called Mo whose peaceful existence is one night shattered by the arrival of Dustfinger--a shadowy man with a mysterious link to Mo's past. Mo and Meggie are soon on the move, running from something that threatens everything they hold dear. But the past inevitably catches up with them and Mo is forced to reveal to his daughter for the first time his terrible secret. He has the ability, or curse, to breathe life into any story he reads and make the characters come alive. Just such a character, the sinister Capricorn, is after Mo to ensure that he stays alive and is never returned to the pages from which he was sprung. And, of course, he'll stop at nothing to guarantee success.
Inkheart is a treat and echoes of its many colourful characters, nail-biting drama and unrelenting invention will stay with the reader for a long time. It's also a novel for people who really love books. (Recommended for ages 10 and over.) --John McLay [via]
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The Jane Austen Book Clubby Karen Joy FowlerISBN 0786265876 (0-7862-6587-6)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Jane Austen Book Club'Book summary:Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love..."I was enchanted. A charming and intelligent read, with the best appendix I've come across since Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time"" - Kate Long, author of "The Bad Mother's Handbook". [via]
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LA Maison De Rendez-Vous and Djinnby Alain Robbe-GrilletISBN 0802130178 (0-8021-3017-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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Lanarkby Alasdair GrayISBN 0807611085 (0-8076-1108-5)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lanark'Book summary:Alasdair Gray's first novel Lanark (first published in 1981) immediately established him as one of the most important Scottish voices of his generation and this astounding work as one of the key British novels of the last century. Magnificent in its reach and unequalled in the adulation of its critical response, Lanark is a massive book.
Perversely we start our reading with Book 3--the hero of this and the last book in the quartet, the eponymous Lanark, lives in a bizarre and fantastical future in a grey, dreary city called Unthank. He doesn't remember how he got there nor who he really is. He hangs around a local cafe with some other young people whose values and mores he can't quite figure. All around people are disappearing. Then he contracts dragonhide... and disappears too. He wakes in an institute and is told the sad but instructional tale of Duncan Thaw (the boy he used to be, the boy, in a sense, Alasdair Gray used to be).
Duncan, unknowingly speaking of the epic of which he is the centre, who we meet as a child and watch grow into an artist , says "I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake." And it is Duncan's story that is the heart of Lanark--and what a poignant, heart-breaking tale it is. From a boy who can never accept or offer or understand love, who cannot connect, to an artist who cannot accept that he cannot have the final word--both in his own life and in his art--Duncan's tale is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story.
Lanark is a work of huge imagination and wonderful range; it is about all of our selves, how we make them and make them up; it is about place and what that means for identity and it is about love--how we can learn to love our selves, or fail to, how we need to love, both ourselves and others, to create communities in which we can create art that will promote a continuing project of place in which we can love each other better. Lanark is peerless. --Mark Thwaite [via]
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Lanark: A Life in Four Booksby Alasdair GrayISBN 080761162X (0-8076-1162-X)
Softcover, Braziller Incorporated, George
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The Last Unicornby Peter S. BeagleISBN 0783803958 (0-7838-0395-8)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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Library: An Unquiet Historyby Matthew BattlesISBN 0786268506 (0-7862-6850-6)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Library: An Unquiet History'Book summary:Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age. Encyclopedic in breadth and novelistic in its telling, Library is a slim history that speaks volumes. [via]
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The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblowerby Cyril Northcote ParkinsonISBN 0750921099 (0-7509-2109-9)
Softcover, Sutton Pub Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower'Book summary:The fictional biography of the famous naval hero, Horatio Hornblower, central character in C. S. Forester's series of 12 celebrated novels. [via]
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Loitering With Intentby Muriel SparkISBN 0698110471 (0-698-11047-1)
Hardcover, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan
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The Magusby John FowlesISBN 0679602836 (0-679-60283-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magus'Book summary:The Magus was originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later. The story of Nicholas Urfe and his friendship with a demonic millionaire which leads to an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps, The Magus endures as the most enigmatic and magical novel in the Fowles canon, a work rich in symbols, conundrums, and labyrinthine twists of events. This Modern Library edition includes a new introduction by the author. [via]
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Master And Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov, Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, Diana Lewis BurginISBN 0679760806 (0-679-76080-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'MASTER AND MARGARITA'Book summary:Suppressed in the Soviet Union for twenty-six years, Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece is an ironic parable of power and its corruption, good and evil, and human frailty and the strength of love. Featuring Satan, accompanied by a retinue that includes the large, fast-talking, vodka drinking black tom cat Behemoth, the beautiful Margarita, her beloved - a distraught writer known only as the Master - Pontius Pilate, and Jesus Christ, The Master and Margarita combines fable, fantasy, political satire, and slapstick comedy into a wildly entertaining and unforgettable tale that is commonly considered one of the greatest novels ever to come out of the Soviet Union. "A wild surrealistic romp.... Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous."-Joyce Carol Oates, The Detroit News; "Fine, funny, imaginative.... The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative."-Saul Maloff, Newsweek; "Funny, devilish, brilliant satire.... It's literature of the highest order and . . . it will deliver a full measure of enjoyment and enlightenment."-Publisher's Weekly; "A rich, funny, moving and bitter novel.... Vast and boisterous entertainment."-The New York Times[via]More editions of Master And Margarita:
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Midnight's Childrenby Salman RushdieISBN 0679444629 (0-679-44462-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Midnight's Children'Book summary:Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:
I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Minds Meetby Walter AbishISBN 0811205584 (0-8112-0558-4)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Mumbo Jumboby Ishmael ReedISBN 0684824779 (0-684-82477-9)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mumbo Jumbo'Book summary:The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the Ages
Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture. [via]
Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discoveryby Brian BoydISBN 0691089574 (0-691-08957-4)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery'Book summary:Brian Boyd has already chronicled the life of Vladimir Nabokov in two superlative volumes, one devoted to the author's silver-age youth in Russia and the other to his American maturity. Now Boyd turns his attention to the great enchanter's trickiest and most unlikely triumph in Nabokov's Pale Fire. With its oddball structure--which shackles an epic poem in heroic couplets to an increasingly loony, enveloping commentary--this 1962 novel has always been a bone of contention among diehard fans. Some consider it less a work of art than a Rube Goldberg contraption, onto which Nabokov has brilliantly bolted his favorite motifs. Others call Pale Fire the author's true masterpiece, and Brian Boyd falls quite emphatically into the latter camp, arguing that the book is no mere satire on literary parasitism:
It is a reflection on the whole history of literature, on the shift from romance to realism, from the old kind of hero with whose glory the reader is invited to identify ... to the modern image of everyman as artist, the suburban Shade, in the modest circumstances of the real, coping with courage and self-control, with imagination, curiosity, tenderness, and kindness, with the fact of his mortality and his losses past and still to come.
Boyd's study is at once a shrewd and eloquent guidebook to the intricacies of Pale Fire and a revisionist argument as to its meaning. After all, Nabokovians have spent the last three decades feuding over the ultimate authorship of this double-decker narrative: could the poet, John Shade, have created both the poem and commentary? Or should both be chalked up to that nutty exegete Charles Kinbote? As he wades into this factional war, Boyd can sometimes appear only nominally less insane than Kinbote. ("The prominence of the Shadean or Kinbotean or 'undecidable' readings had not gone unchallenged. D. Barton Johnson, attending to verbal and subverbal detail, stood largely outside the Shade-Kinbote opposition when he focused on the Botkin behind Kinbote." Help!) Yet his hypothesis--which involves a ghost feeding lines to the living like a posthumous Teleprompter--makes perfect sense. And it reminds us that for all Nabokov's vaunted irony and scientific passion, he was fascinated throughout his entire career by the afterlife. Volodya as theologian? Boyd is smart and persuasive enough to make the concept stick, and to send every last one of us back to Pale Fire--immediately. --James Marcus [via]More editions of Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery:
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A Night in the Lonesome Octoberby Roger Zelazny, Gahan WilsonISBN 0688125085 (0-688-12508-5)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Night in the Lonesome October'Book summary:Snuff, a guard dog who performs thaumaturgical calculations, accompanies his master, Jack, on collecting expeditions into the Whitechapel slums of nineteenth-century London. 35,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. [via]
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Nova Expressby William S. BurroughsISBN 0802133304 (0-8021-3330-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nova Express'Book summary:Nova Express takes William S. Burroughss nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. Its up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these control addicts before its too late.[via]More editions of Nova Express:
Numbers in the Darkby Italo Calvino, Tim ParksISBN 0679743537 (0-679-74353-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Once and Future Kingby Terence Hanbury WhiteISBN 0808576852 (0-8085-7685-2)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Once and Future King'Book summary:FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Describes King Arthur's life from childhood to coronation, the creation of the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. [via]
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Pastoraliaby George SaundersISBN 074755000X (0-7475-5000-X)
Softcover, Bloomsbury Pub Ltd
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Personal Anthologyby Jorge Luis BorgesISBN 0802130771 (0-8021-3077-1)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Personal Anthology'Book summary:After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his workshort stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant sketches, which, in Borgess hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters.[via]More editions of Personal Anthology:
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Pninby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'Book summary:Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. [via]
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knightby Vladimir Nabokov, C. BrennerISBN 0811203271 (0-8112-0327-1)
Hardcover, New Directions Publishing Corporation
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Real Life of Sebastian Knightby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679727264 (0-679-72726-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Restaurant at the End of the Universeby Douglas AdamsISBN 080852187X (0-8085-2187-X)
Hardcover, Bt Bound
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe'Book summary:"DOUGLAS ADAMS IS A TERRIFIC SATIRIST."
--The Washington Post Book World
Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a craving for tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability--and desperately in search of a place to eat.
Among Arthur's motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a longtime friend and expert contributor to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee who's gone native (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody android who suffers nothing and no one very gladly. Their destination? The ultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment and fine dining, where the food (literally) speaks for itself.
Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind that the Hitchhiker's Guide deleted the term "Future Perfect" from its pages, since it was discovered not to be!
"What's such fun is how amusing the galaxy looks through Adams' sardonically silly eyes."
--Detroit Free Press [via]More editions of Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
A Sentimental Journey Through France And Italyby Laurence SterneISBN 0809567326 (0-8095-6732-6)
Hardcover, Wildside Pr
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Shuttlecockby Graham SwiftISBN 0679739335 (0-679-73933-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Siddharthaby Hermann HesseISBN 081120068X (0-8112-0068-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Siddhartha'Book summary:Hermann Hesses classic novel Siddhartha has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. Though set in a place and time far removed from the Germany of 1922, the year of the books debut, the novel is infused with the sensibilities of Hesses time, synthesizing disparate philosophiesEastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualisminto a unique vision of life as expressed through one mans search for meaning.
It is the story of the quest of Siddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege and comfort to seek spiritual fulfillment and wisdom. On his journey, Siddhartha encounters wandering ascetics, Buddhist monks, and successful merchants, as well as a courtesan named Kamala and a simple ferryman who has attained enlightenment. Traveling among these people and experiencing lifes vital passageslove, work, friendship, and fatherhoodSiddhartha discovers that true knowledge is guided from within.
Susan Bernofskys magnificent new translation brings out Hesses inspired lyricism and his elegant, melodious cadences, illuminating the novels universal themes and timeless wisdom about the human condition.
This original Modern Library edition includes a lively new Introduction by Tom Robbins and a glossary of Indian terms. [via] 
A Swiftly Tilting Planetby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0807277576 (0-8072-7757-6)
Softcover, Listening Library
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Tales from the Arabian NightsISBN 0721417590 (0-7214-1759-0)
Hardcover, Ladybird Books Ltd
Find This BookBook summary:The fables and legends of "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", taken from the "Arabian Nights". In these two tales filled with mystery, intrigue and excitement, Aladdin and Ali Baba each make magical discoveries. [via]
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Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystokeby Philip Jose Farmer, Mike Resnick, Win Scott EckertISBN 0803269218 (0-8032-6921-8)
Softcover, Univ of Nebraska Pr
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The Teachings of Don B.by Donald BarthelmeISBN 0679741194 (0-679-74119-4)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Thirteenth Taleby Diane SetterfieldISBN 0743298020 (0-7432-9802-0)
Hardcover, Atria Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Thirteenth Tale'Book summary:Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.
There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:
"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."
She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."
"I am a biographer, I work with facts."
The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida's plan. The transformative power of truth informs the lives of both women by story's end, and The Thirteenth Tale is finally and convincingly told. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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The Thousand Nights and One Nightby E. Powys Mathers, MardrusISBN 0710208693 (0-7102-0869-3)
Hardcover, Marboro Books
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Time's Arrowby Martin AmisISBN 0679735720 (0-679-73572-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Time's Arrow'Book summary:Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes at the moment of Friendly's death and runs backwards in time, like a movie played in reverse, (e.g., factory smokestacks scrub the air clean,) unaware of the terrible past he approaches. The "normal" consciousness runs in time's regular direction, fleeing his ignominious history. [via]
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U and Iby Nicholson BakerISBN 0679735755 (0-679-73575-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'U and I'Book summary:Nicholson Baker is most famous for Vox, the phone-sex novel Monica Lewinsky gave President Clinton, but the vastly superior U and I contains Baker's own dirty little secret: an obsession with John Updike. Not since Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus has one man's genius so publicly tormented another. Baker's ambition is a naked thing shivering with sensitivity, like a snail bereft of its shell. Yet his book about himself thinking about Updike is as hilariously self-knowing as it is excruciatingly sincere. And Baker is not mad (not quite). He does have a few things in common with his idol: fiction precociously published in The New Yorker, psoriasis, insomnia, a keen eye for everyday minutiae, and a mischievously felicitous prose style. He is, however, funnier. Hunting for Updike at The Atlantic's 125th anniversary party, he gets brutally snubbed by Miss Manners--U and I is a fine comedy of literary manners--and cheers up when Tim O'Brien chats with him. But when O'Brien mentions that he golfs with Updike, Baker is hurt:
It didn't matter that I hadn't written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O'Brien.
He justifies this reaction with a remarkably intricate series of associations between his life and Updike's, starting with the major impact a golf joke in an Updike essay once had on him. When Baker reads in the paper that his local cops offer to X-ray kids' candy for razors, he plausibly imagines the droll "Talk of the Town" piece Updike might have spun from the item, glumly noting that Updike's piece would have been better. He even teasingly confesses that U and I constitutes "a little trick-or-treating of my own on Updike's big white front porch." By the time he actually meets his hero (at Rochester's Xerox Auditorium!) in 1981, Baker has transformed him into a character in a Baker story. Quite a trick--and a treat.
In his elegy for Yeats, Auden wrote that a great poet's words are modified in the guts of the living, but Baker proves what really happens: at best we misremember and mangle, shamelessly remaking the master in our own image. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Underworldby Don DelilloISBN 0684842696 (0-684-84269-6)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Underworld'Book summary:While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. [via]
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Unstrung Harp, Or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novelby Edward GoreyISBN 0747550344 (0-7475-5034-4)
Hardcover, Bloomsbury Pub Ltd
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Villa Incognitoby Tom RobbinsISBN 0786258055 (0-7862-5805-5)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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The Vintage Book of Latin American Storiesby Carlos Fuentes, Julio OrtegaISBN 067977551X (0-679-77551-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Wake Up, Sir!by Jonathan AmesISBN 074344907X (0-7434-4907-X)
Softcover, Scribner
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wake Up, Sir!'Book summary:What kind of book has Jonathan Ames written this time? Well, think of Cervantes' Don Quixote, except that Wake Up, Sir! is not as good. But that's all right -- no book is as good as Don Quixote. You might also think of A Confederacy of Dunces, but there again Ames's book falls short. I think, though, we might be pushing this humility business too far.
So how else might we describe this brilliant, comedic, and literary novel? How about brilliant and comedic and literary, which we just used. One could also apply such adjectives as: exuberant, zany, and sexy. God forbid we should give you four adjectives in a row, but you know how it is: The Rule of Three Adjectives!
In fairness, I should say that the last adjective mentioned is somewhat misleading. But there is one rather long sex scene in the book, worthy of placement in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, so it's not entirely misleading.
I imagine that it's about time we gave you a plot summary, without giving too much away, which is never an easy task:
Alan Blair is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. He's also quite skilled at getting into trouble. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet, a wondrously helpful fellow named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his young master.
Our tale begins in Montclair, New Jersey, where Alan gets into a scrape with his uncle Irwin, a gun-toting member of the NRA. So Alan and Jeeves flee New Jersey and take refuge at a Hasidic enclave in Sharon Springs, New York. Unfortunately, more trouble ensues -- involving a woman! -- so Alan and Jeeves again take flight, this time landing at a famous artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There Alan encounters a gorgeous femme fatale who is in possession of the most spectacular nose in the history of noses. Such a nose can only lead to a wild disaster for someone like Alan, and Jeeves tries to help him, but...
Happy reading! [via]
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Waterlandby Graham SwiftISBN 0679739793 (0-679-73979-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waterland'Book summary:Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
"Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times [via]More editions of Waterland:
Wide Sargasso Seaby Jean Rhys, Francis WyndhamISBN 0786200731 (0-7862-0073-1)
Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wide Sargasso Sea'More editions of Wide Sargasso Sea:
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicleby Haruki Murakami, Jay RubinISBN 0679775439 (0-679-77543-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'Book summary:Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.
Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]
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The World According to Garpby John IrvingISBN 0679603069 (0-679-60306-9)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'Book summary:"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Malayalam
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Kathapatrannalum Panketuttavarumby Santos EccikkanamISBN 0749399678 (0-7493-9967-8)
Hardcover, Karant Buks
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kathapatrannalum Panketuttavarum'Book summary:A translated collection of early stories by Calvino. The earliest were written in 1945 when he was 22, and the latest date from the 50s when he was in his early 30s. Calvino's novels include "Invisible Cities" and "The Castle of Crossed Destinies". [via]
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