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books tagged “novels”
books tagged “novels”
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The Age of Reasonby Jean Paul SartreISBN 0394718380 (0-394-71838-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Anne of Green Gablesby L.M. Montgomery, Elizabeth Waterston, Mary Henley RubioISBN 0393926958 (0-393-92695-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Anne of Green Gables'Book summary:When Marilla Cuthbert's brother, Matthew, returns home to Green Gables with a chatty redheaded orphan girl, Marilla exclaims, "But we asked for a boy. We have no use for a girl." It's not long, though, before the Cuthberts can't imagine how they could ever do without young Anne of Green Gables--but not for the original reasons they sought an orphan. Somewhere between the time Anne "confesses" to losing Marilla's amethyst pin (which she never took) in hopes of being allowed to go to a picnic, and when Anne accidentally dyes her hated carrot-red hair green, Marilla says to Matthew, "One thing's for certain, no house that Anne's in will ever be dull." And no book that she's in will be, either. This adapted version of the classic, Anne of Green Gables, introduces younger readers to the irrepressible heroine of L.M. Montgomery's many stories. Adapter M.C. Helldorfer includes only a few of Anne's mirthful and poignant adventures, yet manages to capture the freshness of one of children's literature's spunkiest, most beloved characters. There's just enough to make beginning readers want more--luckily, there's a lot more in the originals! Illustrator Ellen Beier creates vibrant pictures to portray the beauty of the land around Green Gables and the spirited nature of Anne herself. (Ages 5 to 8) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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Annotated Aliceby Martin Gardner, Lewis Carroll, John TennielISBN 0393048470 (0-393-04847-0)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Annotated Alice'Book summary:"What is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations!"
Readers who share Alice's taste in books will be more than satisfied with The Annotated Alice, a volume that includes not only pictures and conversations, but a thorough gloss on the text as well. There may be some, like G.K. Chesterton, who abhor the notion of putting Lewis Carroll's masterpiece under a microscope and analyzing it within an inch of its whimsical life. But as Martin Gardner points out in his introduction, so much of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is composed of private jokes and details of Victorian manners and mores that modern audiences are not likely to catch. Yes, Alice can be enjoyed on its own merits, but The Annotated Alice appeals to the nosy parker in all of us. Thus we learn, for example, that the source of the mouse's tale may have been Alfred Lord Tennyson who "once told Carroll that he had dreamed a lengthy poem about fairies, which began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each." And that, contrary to popular belief, the Mad Hatter character was not a parody of then Prime Minister Gladstone, but rather was based on an Oxford furniture dealer named Theophilus Carter.
Gardner's annotations run the gamut from the factual and historical to the speculative and are, in their own way, quite as fascinating as the text they refer to. Occasionally, he even comments on himself, as when he quotes a fellow annotator of Alice, James Kincaid: "The historical context does not call for a gloss but the passage provides an opportunity to point out the ambivalence that may attend the central figure and her desire to grow up." And then follows with a charming riposte: "I thank Mr. Kincaid for supporting my own rambling." There's a lot of information in the margins (indeed, the page is pretty evenly divided between Carroll's text and Gardner's), but the ramblings turn out to be well worth the time. So hand over your old copy of Lewis Carroll's classic to the kids--this Alice in Wonderland is intended entirely for adults. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Breakfast of Championsby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385334206 (0-385-33420-6)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Breakfast of Champions'Book summary:"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.
Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count. [via]
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Changing Placesby David LodgeISBN 0436256606 (0-436-25660-6)
Hardcover, Secker and Warburg
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Changing Places'Book summary:Anyone intrigued by differences between American and British academic institutions will find this an amusing and accurate send-up. David Lodge, portraying two American and British professors who replace one another at their respective institutions, gives greed, pettiness, and pretense full rein. [via]
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Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Manby Thomas MannISBN 0436272318 (0-436-27231-8)
Hardcover, Secker & Warburg
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Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Yearsby Thomas MannISBN 0394420128 (0-394-42012-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Couplesby John UpdikeISBN 0394420667 (0-394-42066-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Couples'Book summary:The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage and adultery in America.
From the Paperback edition. [via]More editions of Couples:
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The Crossingby Cormac McCarthyISBN 0394574753 (0-394-57475-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crossing'Book summary:The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.
This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.
Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.
But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg [via]
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The Daughter of Timeby Josephine TeyISBN 0425019276 (0-425-01927-6)
Softcover, Berkley Pub Group
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Death Comes for the Archbishopby Willa CatherISBN 0394605039 (0-394-60503-9)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death Comes for the Archbishop'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Willa Cathers story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rockwhile contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier. [via]More editions of Death Comes for the Archbishop:
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Desolation Islandby Patrick O'BrianISBN 039330812X (0-393-30812-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desolation Island'Book summary:"The relationship [between Aubrey and Maturin]...is about the best thing afloat....For Conradian power of description and sheer excitement there is nothing in naval fiction to beat the stern chase as the outgunned Leopard staggers through mountain waves in icy latitudes to escape the Dutch seventy-four."Stephen Vaughan, Observer
Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and surgeon Stephen Maturin sail the Leopard to Australia with a hold full of convicts. Among them is a beautiful and dangerous spyand a treacherous disease that decimates the crew. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the undermanned, outgunned Leopard sails for her life into the freezing waters of the Antarctic, where, in mountain seas, the Dutchman closes... [via] 
Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friendby Thomas MannISBN 0394422244 (0-394-42224-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Dr. Faustusby Thomas MannISBN 0394603656 (0-394-60365-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Elizabeth Costelloby J. M. CoetzeeISBN 0436206161 (0-436-20616-1)
Hardcover, Trafalgar Square
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Enduring Loveby Ian McEwanISBN 0385494149 (0-385-49414-9)
Softcover, Anchor Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Enduring Love'Book summary:Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.
In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.
Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. [via]
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Flaubert's Parrotby Julian BarnesISBN 039454272X (0-394-54272-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flaubert's Parrot'Book summary:Just what sort of book is Flaubert's Parrot, anyway? A literary biography of 19th-century French novelist, radical, and intellectual impresario Gustave Flaubert? A meditation on the uses and misuses of language? A novel of obsession, denial, irritation, and underhanded connivery? A thriller complete with disguises, sleuthing, mysterious meetings, and unknowing targets? An extended essay on the nature of fiction itself?
On the surface, at first, Julian Barnes's book is the tale of an elderly English doctor's search for some intriguing details of Flaubert's life. Geoffrey Braithwaite seems to be involved in an attempt to establish whether a particularly fine, lovely, and ancient stuffed parrot is in fact one originally "borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his worktable during the writing of Un coeur simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Felicité, the principal character of the tale."
What begins as a droll and intriguing excursion into the minutiae of Flaubert's life and intellect, along with an attempt to solve the small puzzle of the parrot--or rather parrots, for there are two competing for the title of Gustave's avian confrere--soon devolves into something obscure and worrisome, the exploration of an arcane Braithwaite obsession that is perhaps even pathological. The first hint we have that all is not as it seems comes almost halfway into the book, when after a humorously cantankerous account of the inadequacies of literary critics, Braithwaite closes a chapter by saying, "Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage." And from that point, things just get more and more curious, until they end in the most unexpected bang.
One passage perhaps best describes the overall effect of this extraordinary story: "You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string." Julian Barnes demonstrates that it is possible to catch quite an interesting fish no matter how you define the net. --Andrew Himes [via]
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Foeby J. M. CoetzeeISBN 0436102986 (0-436-10298-6)
Hardcover, Secker & Warburg
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Foe'Book summary:When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the middle of the Atlantic she enters the world of two men. One is a mute negro called Friday; the other is Robinson Cruso. The Island is a society already at work. Its rules are simple: survival, industry and order. Cruso is master and Friday is the slave. Susan watches the creation of a barren world - an architecture of stone terraces above bleak and empty beaches - and waits to be rescued. Back in London, with Friday in tow as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of the island than in the story if Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject. Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the mystery of Cruso's island, is the silent Friday. [via]
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The Fortune of Warby Patrick O'BrianISBN 0393308138 (0-393-30813-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fortune of War'Book summary:"A marvellously full-flavoured, engrossing book, which towers over its current rivals in the genre like a three-decker over a ship's longboat."Times Literary Supplement
Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best-armed frigate in the Navy. He and his friend Stephen Maturin take passage for England in a dispatch vessel. But the War of 1812 breaks out while they are en route. Bloody actions precipitate them both into new and unexpected scenes where Stephen's past activities as a secret agent return on him with a vengeance.
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Geek Loveby Katherine DunnISBN 0394569024 (0-394-56902-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Geek Love'Book summary:A wild, often horrifying, novel about freaks, geeks and other aberrancies of the human condition who travel together (a whole family of them) as a circus. It's a solipsistic funhouse world that makes "normal" people seem bland and pitiful. Arturo the Aqua-Boy, who has flippers and an enormous need to be loved. A museum of sacred monsters that didn't make it. An endearing "little beetle" of a heroine. Sort of like Tod Browning's Freaks crossed with David Lynch and John Irving and perhaps George Eliot -- the latter for the power of the emotions evoked. [via]
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Go Tell It on the Mountainby James BaldwinISBN 0385334575 (0-385-33457-5)
Softcover, Delta
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Go Tell It on the Mountain'Book summary:First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.
Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."
Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin [via]
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Grendelby John Champlin GardnerISBN 0394740564 (0-394-74056-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Grendelby John GardnerISBN 0394471431 (0-394-47143-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Guermantes Wayby Marcel ProustISBN 0394705963 (0-394-70596-3)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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A Handful of Dustby Evelyn WaughISBN 0412505703 (0-412-50570-3)
Hardcover, Chapman & Hall
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The History of Loveby Nicole KraussISBN 0393328627 (0-393-32862-7)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The History of Love'Book summary:Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is a hauntingly beautiful novel about two characters whose lives are woven together in such complex ways that even after the last page is turned, the reader is left to wonder what really happened. In the hands of a less gifted writer, unraveling this tangled web could easily give way to complete chaos. However, under Krauss's watchful eye, these twists and turns only strengthen the impact of this enchanting book.
The History of Love spans of period of over 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. At the center of each main character's psyche is the issue of loneliness, and the need to fill a void left empty by lost love. Leo Gursky is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. ("I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty.") Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer vacillates between wanting to memorialize her dead father and finding a way to lift her mother's veil of depression. At the same time, she's trying to save her brother Bird, who is convinced he may be the Messiah, from becoming a 10-year-old social pariah. As the connection between Leo and Alma is slowly unmasked, the desperation, along with the potential for salvation, of this unique pair is also revealed.
The poetry of her prose, along with an uncanny ability to embody two completely original characters, is what makes Krauss an expert at her craft. But in the end, it's the absolute belief in the uninteruption of love that makes this novel a pleasure, and a wonder to behold. --Gisele Toueg [via]
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Homo Faberby Ackermann P. K.ISBN 0395144027 (0-395-14402-7)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div
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Humboldt's Gift: Library Editionby Saul BellowISBN 0436039508 (0-436-03950-8)
Hardcover, Secker and Warburg
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The Intuitionistby Colson WhiteheadISBN 0385493002 (0-385-49300-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Intuitionist'Book summary:Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of the vertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.
Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead, "that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.
Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson [via]
Joseph Andrewsby Henry FieldingISBN 0395051576 (0-395-05157-6)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div
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Joseph Andrewsby Stephen CopleyISBN 0416412408 (0-416-41240-8)
Softcover, Routledge
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Joseph Andrews With Shamela and Related Writingsby Henry Fielding, Homer GoldbergISBN 0393955559 (0-393-95555-9)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Joseph Andrews With Shamela and Related Writings'Book summary:This Norton Critical Edition reprints the authoritative Wesleyan text of Joseph Andrews, edited by Martin Battestin.
An accurate text of Shamela (Fieldings satire of Samuel Richardsons Pamela, the most popular epistolary novel of the eighteenth century) as well as An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, selections from The Champion, and the Preface to The Adventures of David Simple are also included. All of the texts are fully annotated.
"Backgrounds" contains generous extracts from works that Fielding satirizedPamela and Conyer Middletons Dedication to the Life of Ciceroand emulatedGil Blas and selections from Don Quixote, the Roman Comique, and Le Paysan Parvenu. The section concludes with a general explanation of the political and religious contexts in which Joseph Andrews was written.
"Criticism" offers a broad range of responses to the novel. Contemporary assessments include selected letters of Thomas Gray, William Shenstone, Samuel Richardson, and others as well as commentary from The Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, by William Hazlitt, James Beattie, and Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier.
Modern assessments are by Mark Spilka, Dick Taylor, Jr., Martin Battestin, Sheldon Sacks, Morris Golden, Brian McCrea, and Homer Goldberg.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
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The Letter of Marqueby Patrick O'BrianISBN 0393309053 (0-393-30905-3)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Letter of Marque'Book summary:"Fine stuff...[The Letter of Marque] leaves the devotee of naval fiction eager for sequels."Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
Captain Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck off the list of post-captains for a crime he did not commit. His old friend Stephen Maturin, usually cast as a ship's surgeon to mask his discreet activities on behalf of British Intelligence, has bought for Aubrey his former ship the Surprise to command as a privateer, more politely termed a letter of marque. Together they sail on a desperate mission against the French, which, if successful, may redeem Aubrey from the private hell of his disgrace. [via] 
Life and Times of Michael Kby Michael CoetzeeISBN 0436102978 (0-436-10297-8)
Hardcover, Secker & Warburg
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Lorna Dooneby R. D. BlackmoreISBN 0396066046 (0-396-06604-6)
Hardcover, Dodd Mead
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Man Without Qualitiesby Robert MusilISBN 0399501525 (0-399-50152-5)
Softcover, Perigee
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Man Without Qualities: The Like of It Now HappensISBN 0436298007 (0-436-29800-7)
Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc
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Mansfield Parkby Jane Austen, Mary E. ChaseISBN 0393002748 (0-393-00274-8)
Softcover, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mansfield Park'Book summary:A new edition of a satire on Richardson's PAMELA, featuring the character of Parson Adams. With explanatory notes by A R Humphreys. [via]
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Many Watersby Madeleine L'EngleISBN 0440227704 (0-440-22770-4)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Many Waters'Book summary:We've all done it. In the frigid depths of winter we've wished we could be magically transported to someplace warm and sunny. But most people don't have genius parents who just happen to be working on a scientific experiment with time travel at the moment of our wish. Sandy and Dennys Murry, the "normal" boys in a family of geniuses, suddenly find themselves trudging through a blazing-hot desert, seeking a far-off oasis for shade. Their desperate wandering brings them face-to-face with history--biblical history. Soon they're feeling right at home with Noah and his family. Even so, the urgent question is, how will Sandy and Dennys get back to their own place and time before the floods--the many waters--come? As they begin to cross the invisible border into adulthood, the twins must confront their ability to resist temptation and embrace integrity.
In Many Waters, Madeleine L'Engle continues the Murry family saga, which includes A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which won the American Book Award. L'Engle's mystical mix of science fiction and fantasy, time and space travel, history, morals, religion, and culture once again urges her many adoring readers to stretch their minds and hearts to understand why the world is the way it is. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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Map of the Worldby Jane HamiltonISBN 0385720106 (0-385-72010-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Map of the World'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, December 1999: In A Map of the World, appearance overwhelms reality and communal hysteria threatens common sense. Howard and Alice Goodheart, the couple at the center of Jane Hamilton's 1994 novel, have labored mightily to create a pastoral paradise in a Wisconsin subdivision. Their 400-acre dairy farm is the last in Prairie Center, and they're working flat out to raise their two young girls in a traditionally bucolic manner. Yet paradoxically, they strike their neighbors as unacceptably modern, and have been treated as interlopers since the day of their arrival. Howard, in love with his vocation, chooses not to believe that they've been frozen out. But Alice, flinty and quick to judge, finds things harder. And her job as school nurse doesn't work wonders for her reputation either. Happily, there's one exception to this epidemic of unfriendliness: their closest neighbors. Theresa and Dan, who also have two young daughters, function as a virtual lifeline for the embattled family.
But in June 1990, whatever idyll the Goodhearts have worked for comes to a permanent end. On a beautiful morning--marred by her 5-year-old's tantrum but still recuperable--Alice looks forward to taking her children and Theresa's youngest for a swim. Distracted for several minutes, she has no idea that the 2-year-old is no longer in the house:
Lizzy had run to the pond and splashed in. It had felt good on her hot feet and she kept running and then she was pedaling and pedaling. She tried to grab hold of the water, pawing for the metal bar, a ladder rung, her mother, but there was nothing. She clutched and flailed.... She sank. The trout that Howard had stocked in the pond swam along through the dark water. They noticed Lizzy out of the corner of their eyes. They had inherited the knowledge of that look, and they knew it by heart.
This is only the first of Alice's body blows. Next, she's questioned about one of her students, a memorably bad seed. On the verge of collapse, she cries out, "I hurt everybody!"--which will later be construed as a confession. Charged with sexual abuse and unable to come up with $100,000 in bail, she is forced to await trial in jail.Narrated first by Alice, then Howard, and then Alice again, A Map of the World moves from intimate domesticity to courtroom drama with grace and subtlety. Hamilton wrote her book when accusations of abuse in schools and day care were peaking, yet this is not a modish work or an "issue novel" but a lasting creation of several complex lives. At one point, fed up with civil mechanisms, Alice tells her lawyer: "'Let Oprah be the judge.... Let Robbie and me, Mrs. Mackessy, Howard, Theresa, Dan, Mrs. Glevitch--let all of us come before Oprah. Let the studio audience decide. They're nice suburban woman, many of them, dressed for a lark. They have common sense and speak their minds.'" Apparently La Winfrey was listening, since she chose this beautifully observed novel for her book club. --Kerry Fried [via]
More editions of Map of the World:
- Map of the World: ISBN 0385473117 (0-385-47311-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc - A Map of the World: ISBN 0385473109 (0-385-47310-9)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing - A Map of the World: ISBN 0385500769 (0-385-50076-9)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing - Map of the World: ISBN 0385720106 (0-385-72010-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- Map of the World: ISBN 0385473117 (0-385-47311-7)
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Master and Commanderby Patrick O'BrianISBN 0393307050 (0-393-30705-0)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Master and Commander'Book summary:An attractive movie-tie-in jacket for the release of the motion picture Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World starring Russell Crowe: "The best sea story I have ever read."--Sir Francis Chichester This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war are faultless rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle. It is the dawn of the nineteenth century; Britain is at war with Napoleon's France. When Jack Aubrey, a young lieutenant in Nelson's navy, is promoted to captain, he inherits command of HMS Sophie , an old, slow brig unlikely to make his fortune. But Captain Aubrey is a brave and gifted seaman, his thirst for adventure and victory immense. With the aid of his friend Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and secret intelligence agent, Aubrey and his crew engage in one thrilling battle after another, their journey culminating in a stunning clash with a mighty Spanish frigate against whose guns and manpower the tiny Sophie is hopelessly outmatched. [via]
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My Name Is Asher Levby Chaim PotokISBN 0394461371 (0-394-46137-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Name Is Asher Lev'Book summary:"Memorable...A book profound in its vision of humanity, of religion, and of art."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Here is the original, deeply moving story of Asher Lev, the religious boy with an overwhelming need to draw, to paint, to render the world he knows and the pain he feels, on canvas for everyone to see. A loner, Asher has an extroardinary God-given gift that possesses a spirit all its own. It is this force that must learn to master without shaming his people or relinquishing any part of his deeply felt Judaism. It will not be easy for him, but he knows, too, that even if it is impossible, it must be done....
"A novel of finely articulated tragic power...Little short of a work of genius."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW [via]More editions of My Name Is Asher Lev:
Nice Workby David LodgeISBN 0436256673 (0-436-25667-3)
Hardcover, Secker & Warburg
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Nothing Like the Sunby Anthony BurgessISBN 039331507X (0-393-31507-X)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nothing Like the Sun'Book summary:Before Shakespeare in Love, there was Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun: a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life.
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O Pioneers!by Willa Cather, Sharon O'BrienISBN 0393924661 (0-393-92466-1)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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O Pioneers! and Other Tales of the Praireby Willa CatherISBN 0385487207 (0-385-48720-7)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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› Find signed collectible books: 'O Pioneers! and Other Tales of the Praire'Book summary:The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes, curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer trunk.
"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may send for it, and I may not. [via]More editions of O Pioneers! and Other Tales of the Praire:
Op Tommyknockersby Stephen KingISBN 0399136991 (0-399-13699-1)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
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Perfume: The Story of a Murdererby Patrick SuskindISBN 0394550846 (0-394-55084-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Perfume: The Story of a Murderer'Book summary:The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-mongers bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Orphaned, passed over to the monks as a charity case, already there is something in the aura of the tiny infant that is unsettling. No one will look after him; he is somehow too demanding, and, even more disturbing, something is missing: as his wet nurse tries to explain, he doesnt smell the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all.
Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. With mounting unease, yet hypnotized, we see him explore his powers and their effect on the world around him. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been, he has no need of the light, and darkness is not dark to him, because nothing can mask the odors of the universe.
As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself.
At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous quest: to find and extract from the most perfect living creaturesthe most beautiful young virgins in the land that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. As his trail leads him, at an ever-quickening pace, from his savage exile to the heart of the country and then back to Paris, we are caught up in a rising storm of terror and mortal sensual conquest until the frenzy of his final triumph explodes in all its horrifying consequences.
Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of a grown-up fairy tale, Perfume is one of the most remarkable novels of the last fifty years. [via]More editions of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer:
Podkayne of Marsby Robert A. HeinleinISBN 0441012981 (0-441-01298-1)
Softcover, Berkley Pub Group
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Portnoy's Complaintby Philip RothISBN 0394441982 (0-394-44198-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Portnoy's Complaint'Book summary:Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via] -
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinnerby James HoggISBN 0393005151 (0-393-00515-1)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner'Book summary:The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / General; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Psychological; True Crime / Murder / General; [via]
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Quicksilverby Neal StephensonISBN 0434008931 (0-434-00893-1)
Softcover, Heinemann
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Quicksilver'Book summary:Quicksilver is a massive, exuberant and wildly ambitious historical novel that's also Neal Stephenson's eagerly awaited prequel to Cryptonomicon--his pyrotechnic reworking of the 20th century, from World War II codebreaking and disinformation to the latest issues of Internet data privacy.
Quicksilver, "Volume One of the Baroque Cycle", backtracks to another time of high intellectual ferment: the late 17th century, with the natural philosophers of England's newly formed Royal Society questioning the universe and dissecting everything that moves. One founding member, the Rev John Wilkins, really did write science fiction and a book on cryptography--but this isn't history as we know it, for here his code book is called not Mercury but Cryptonomicon. And although the key political schemers of Charles II's government still have initials spelling the word CABAL, their names are all different...
While towering geniuses like Newton and Leibniz decode nature itself, bizarre adventures (merely beginning with the Great Plague and Great Fire) happen to the fictional Royal Society member Daniel Waterhouse, who knows everyone but isn't quite bright enough for cutting-edge science. Two generations of Daniel's family appear in Cryptonomicon, as does a descendant of the Shaftoes who here are soldiers and vagabonds. Other links include the island realm of Qwghlm with its impossible language and the mysterious, seemingly ageless alchemist Enoch Root.
As the reign of Charles II gives way to that of James II and then William of Orange, Stephenson traces the complex lines of finance and power that form the 17th-century Internet. Gold and silver, lead and (repeatedly) mercury or quicksilver flow in glittering patterns between centres of marketing and intrigue in England, Germany, France and Holland. Paper flows as well: stocks, shares, scams and letters holding layers of concealed code messages. Binary code? Yes, even that had already been invented and described by Francis Bacon.
Quicksilver is crammed with unexpected incidents, fascinating digressions and deep-laid plots. Who'd believe that Eliza, a Qwghlmian slave girl liberated from a Turkish harem by mad Jack Shaftoe (King of the Vagabonds) could become a major player in European finance and politics? Still less believable, but all too historically authentic, are the appalling medical procedures of the time--about which we learn a lot. There are frequent passages of high comedy, like the lengthy description of a foppish earl's costume which memorably explains that someone seemed to have been painted in glue before "shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies".
This is a huge, exhausting read, full of rewards and quirky insights that no other author could have created. Fantastic or farcical episodes sometimes clash strangely with the deep cruelty and suffering of 17th-century realism. Recommended, though not to the faint-hearted. --David Langford [via]
Rebeccaby John MilneISBN 0435272616 (0-435-27261-6)
Softcover, Delta Systems Co Inc
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Remembrance of Things Past : Swann's Way and Within a Budding Groveby Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence KilmartinISBN 0394711823 (0-394-71182-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Remembrance of Things Past : Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove'Book summary:Here are the first two volumes of Prousts monumental achievement, Swanns Way and Within a Budding Grove. The famous overture to Swann's Way sets down the grand themes that govern In Search of Lost Time: as the narrator recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, exquisite memories, long since passedhis mothers good-night kiss, the water lilies on the Vivonne, his love for Swanns daughter Gilbertespring vividly into being. In Within a Budding Grovewhich won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing the author instant famethe narrator turns from his childhood recollections and begins to explore the memories of his adolescence. As his affections for Gilberte grow dim, the narrator discovers a new object of attention in the bright-eyed Albertine. Their encounters unfold by the shores of Balbec. One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
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The Rule Of Fourby Ian Caldwell, Dustin ThomasonISBN 0440241359 (0-440-24135-9)
Softcover, Bantam Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rule Of Four'Book summary:An ivy league murder, a mysterious coded manuscript, and the secrets of a Renaissance prince collide memorably in The Rule of Four-a brilliant work of fiction that weaves together suspense and scholarship, high art and unimaginable treachery.It's Easter at Princeton. Seniors are scrambling to finish their theses. And two students, Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, are a hair's breadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili-a renowned text attributed to an Italian nobleman, a work that has baffled scholars since its publication in 1499. For Tom, their research has been a link to his family's past-and an obstacle to the woman he loves. For Paul, it has become an obsession, the very reason for living. But as their deadline looms, research has stalled-until a long-lost diary surfaces with a vital clue. And when a fellow researcher is murdered just hours later, Tom and Paul realize that they are not the first to glimpse the Hypnerotomachia 's secrets. Suddenly the stakes are raised, and as the two friends sift through the codes and riddles at the heart of the text, they are beginnning to see the manuscript in a new light-not simply as a story of faith, eroticism and pedantry, but as a bizarre, coded mathematical maze. And as they come closer and closer to deciphering the final puzzle of a book that has shattered careers, friendships and families, they know that their own lives are in mortal danger. Because at least one person has been killed for knowing too much. And they know even more.From the streets of fifteenth-century Rome to the rarified realm of the Ivy League, from a shocking 500 year-old murder scene to the drama of a young man's coming of age, The Rule of Four takes us on an entertaining, illuminating tour of history-as it builds to a pinnacle of nearly unbearable suspense. [via]
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Salems Lotby Stephen King, Jerry N. UelsmannISBN 0385516487 (0-385-51648-7)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Salems Lot'Book summary:Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.
Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster [via]
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Saturdayby Ian McEwanISBN 0385511809 (0-385-51180-9)
Hardcover, Doubleday
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Saturday'Book summary:From the pen of a master - the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement - comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him - with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive. [via]
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Skeleton Crewby Stephen KingISBN 039913039X (0-399-13039-X)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Skeleton Crew'Book summary:In the introduction to Skeleton Crew (1985), his second collection of stories, King pokes fun at his penchant for "literary elephantiasis," makes scatological jokes about his muse, confesses how much money he makes (gross and net), and tells a story about getting arrested one time when he was "suffused with the sort of towering, righteous rage that only drunk undergraduates can feel." He winds up with an invitation to a scary voyage: "Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way."
And he sure does. Skeleton Crew contains a superb short novel ("The Mist") that alone is worth the price of admission, plus two forgettable poems and 20 short stories on such themes as an evil toy monkey, a human-eating water slick, a machine that avenges murder, and unnatural creatures that inhabit the thick woods near Castle Rock, Maine. The short tales range from simply enjoyable to surprisingly good.
In addition to "The Mist," the real standout is "The Reach," a beautifully subtle story about a great-grandmother who was born on a small island off the coast of Maine and has lived there her whole life. She has never been across "the Reach," the body of water between island and mainland. This is the story that King fans give to their friends who don't read horror in order to show them how literate, how charming a storyteller he can be. Don't miss it. --Fiona Webster [via]
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Slapstickby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385334230 (0-385-33423-0)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Slapstick'Book summary:Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death.
In Slapstick, Vonnegut muses on war, man's hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with--but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope--for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely.
It's best to end with a quote from the prologue wherein the author discourses on The Meaning of It All, or at least This Book: "Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go off looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please--a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"
Amen. [via]More editions of Slapstick:
Slapstick : Or Lonesome No More!by Kurt VonnegutISBN 0440180090 (0-440-18009-0)
Softcover, Dell Publishing
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Sophie's Choiceby William StyronISBN 0394461096 (0-394-46109-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sophie's Choice'Book summary:Set in Brooklyn in 1947, this is the story of Sophie, a Polish Catholic immigrant who is haunted by her memories of the concentration camp in wartime Europe, and the terrible choice she was forced to make. [via]
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The Sportswriterby Richard FordISBN 0394743253 (0-394-74325-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Starship Troopersby Robert A. HeinleinISBN 0441014100 (0-441-01410-0)
Softcover, Ace Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Starship Troopers'Book summary:Juan Rico signed up with the Federal Reserve on a lark, but despite the hardships and rigorous training, he finds himself determined to make it as a cap trooper. In boot camp he will learn how to become a soldier, but when he graduates and war comes (as it always does for soldiers), he will learn why he is a soldier. Many consider this Hugo Award winner to be Robert Heinlein's finest work, and with good reason. Forget the battle scenes and high-tech weapons (though this novel has them)--this is Heinlein at the top of his game talking people and politics. [via]
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Surfacingby Margaret AtwoodISBN 0385491050 (0-385-49105-0)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Surfacing'Book summary:Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole. [via]
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The Surgeon's Mateby Patrick O'BrianISBN 0393308200 (0-393-30820-0)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Surgeon's Mate'Book summary:"Vividly detailed 19th-century settings and dramatic tension punctuated with flashes of wry humor make O'Brian's nautical adventure a splendid treat."Publishers Weekly
Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by dispatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination, as anything Patrick O'Brian has written.
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The Talismanby Stephen King, Peter StraubISBN 0425105334 (0-425-10533-4)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Talisman'Book summary:The story of Jack Sawyer, a thirteen year old boy from New Hampshire who encounters a frightening adventure with the talisman as he travels across the United States. [via]
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Tommyknockersby Stephen KingISBN 0399133143 (0-399-13314-3)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tommyknockers'Book summary:[This is Part 2 of a 2 part cassette audiobook edition.]
Something was happening in Bobbi Anderson's idyllic small town of Haven, Maine. Something that gave every man, woman, and child in town powers far beyond ordinary mortals. Something that turned the town into a death trap for all outsiders. Something that came from a metal object, buried for millennia, that Bobbi stumbled across. It wasn't that Bobbi and the other good folks of Haven had sold their souls to reap the rewards of the most deadly evil this side of hell. It was more like a diabolical takeover&an invasion of body and soul--and mind. [via]
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The Wind in the Willowsby Kenneth GrahameISBN 0440403855 (0-440-40385-5)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wind in the Willows'Book summary:"[Mole] thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again." Such is the cautious, agreeable Mole's first introduction to the river and the Life Adventurous. Emerging from his home at Mole End one spring, his whole world changes when he hooks up with the good-natured, boat-loving Water Rat, the boastful Toad of Toad Hall, the society- hating Badger who lives in the frightening Wild Wood, and countless other mostly well-meaning creatures. Michael Hague's exquisitely detailed, breathtaking color illustrations on almost every generous spread--along with Kenneth Grahame's elegant, delightfully old-fashioned characterizations of the animals--make this book a wonderful read-aloud. Grahame's The Wind in the Willows has enchanted readers for four generations, and this lavishly illustrated gift edition is perhaps the finest around. (All ages, or 9 to 12) [via]
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The Witches of Eastwickby John UpdikeISBN 0394537602 (0-394-53760-2)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Witches of Eastwick'Book summary:Toward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculptor, summons thunderstorms; Jane, a cellist, floats on the air; and Sukie, the local gossip columnist, turns milk into cream. Their happy little coven takes on new, malignant life when a dark and moneyed stranger, Darryl Van Horne, refurbishes the long-derelict Lenox mansion and invites them in to play. Thenceforth scandal flits through the darkening, crooked streets of Eastwickand through the even darker fantasies of the towns collective psyche.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of The Witches of Eastwick:
Within a Budding Groveby Marcel ProustISBN 0394705955 (0-394-70595-5)
Hardcover, Vintage Books
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Young Torlessby Robert Musil, Eithne Wilkins, Ernst KaiserISBN 0394710150 (0-394-71015-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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