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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'
Partial Contents: Definition of Melancholy; Causes of Melancholy; Bad Diet; Passions and Perturbations of the Mind; Symptoms or Signs of Melancholy in the body; Prognosticks of Melancholy; Unlawful Cures Rejected; Lawful Cures; Diet Rectified; Deformity of Body, Sickness, Baseness of Birth; Against Poverty and Want and other Adversities; Against: Servitude, Loss of Liberty, Imprisonment, Sorrow for death of Friends, Vain Fear, Envy, Emulation, Hatred, Ambition, Self-love, and all other Affections; Against: Repulse, Abuses, Injuries, Disgraces, Slanders; Cure of Melancholy all over the Body; Love-Melancholy; Symptoms or Signs of Love-Melancholy; Symptoms of Jealously, fear, sorrow, suspicion; Cure of Jealously; Religious Melancholy. An outstanding analysis of what melancholy is, its kinds, causes, symptoms, prognosticks, and several cures for it; Philosophically, Medicinally, and Historically. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'
One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton's spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today's readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostics and Several Cures of It'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby'
Includes an afterword by the author.
Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosbys pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.
Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolffs subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Case of Comrade Tulayev'
The Case of Comrade Tulayev One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence--at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But "The Case of Comrade Tulayev," unques... Full description [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of a Justified Sinner'
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Introduction by Roger Lewis [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Count D'Orgel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Count D'orgel's Ball'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fancies and Goodnights'
John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Roald Dahl. With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that it's always easy to tell one from another), Collier's dazzling stories explore the implacable logic of lunacy, revealing a surreal landscape whose unstable surface is depth-charged with surprise. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fountain Overflows'
The lives of the talented Aubrey children have long been clouded by their father?s genius for instability, but his new job in the London suburbs promises, for a time at least, reprieve from scandal and the threat of ruin. Mrs. Aubrey, a former concert pianist, struggles to keep the family afloat, but then she is something of a high-strung eccentric herself, as is all too clear to her daughter Rose, through whose loving but sometimes cruel eyes events are seen. Still, living on the edge holds the promise of the unexpected, and the Aubreys, who encounter furious poltergeists, turn up hidden masterpieces, and come to the aid of a murderess, will find that they have adventure to spare.
In The Fountain Overflows, a 1957 best seller, Rebecca West transmuted her own volatile childhood into enduring art. This is an unvarnished but affectionate picture of an extraordinary family, in which a remarkable stylist and powerful intelligence surveys the elusive boundaries of childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependency, the ordinary and the occult. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fox in the Attic'
A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early Twenties, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family, and on his struggle to make sense of the world, devastated by the Great War, in which he is condemned to come to maturity. Unjustly suspected of having had a hand in the murder of a young girl, Augustine takes refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives. There his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism. The book comes to a climax with a brilliant description of the Munich putsch, and a disturbingly intimate portrait of Adolph Hitler.
The Fox in the Attic, like its no less remarkable sequel The Wooden Sheperdess, offers a richly detailed, Tolstoyan overview of the modern world and its pathologies. At once a novel of ideas and an exploration of the dark spaces of the heart, it is a book in which the past returns in all its original unpredictability and strangeness. [via]
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiecea richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley's own introduction to the novel. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Go-Between'
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there", begins L. P. Hartley's tale of nostalgia, the reawakening of lost memories, and the sexual awareness of an adolescent boy. It is 1952. Leo, now in his sixties, comes upon an old diary and is drawn back to the hot summer of 1900, when he visited Brandham Hall. He has managed to forget serving during his stay as a messenger between a young woman and her lover -- and to forget also the devastating events that ensued and destroyed his beliefs and his hopes for the future. As his memories begin to unfold and Leo recalls the lost era of Victorian country gentry, he finds he must reinterpret his newly discovered past in terms of his present life. This first annotated edition of Hartley's 1953 classic contains a number of corrections based on the surviving handwritten manuscript. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hadrian the Seventh'
One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'High Wind in Jamaica'
A High Wind in Jamaica is not so much a book as a curious object, like a piece of driftwood torqued into an alarming shape from years at sea. And like driftwood, it seems not to have been made, exactly, but simply to have come into being, so perfectly is its form married to its content. The five Bas-Thornton children must leave their parents in Jamaica after a terrible hurricane blows down their family home. Accompanied by their Creole friends, the Fernandez children, they board a ship that is almost immediately set upon by pirates. The children take to corsair life coolly and matter-of-factly; just as coolly do they commit horrible deeds, and have horrible deeds visited upon them. First published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica has been compared to Lord of the Flies in its unflinching portrayal of innocence corrupted, but Richard Hughes is the supreme ironist William Golding never was. He possesses the ability to be one moment thoroughly inside a character's head, and the next outside of it altogether, hilariously commenting.
Irony finds a happy home indeed in the book's mixture of the macabre and the adorable. The baby girl, Rachel, "could even sum up maternal feelings for a marline-spike, and would sit up aloft rocking it in her arms and crooning. The sailors avoided walking underneath: for such an infant, if dropped from a height, will find its way through the thickest skull (an accident which sometimes befalls unpopular captains)." In that "such an infant" lies a world of mordant wit. In fact, throughout, Hughes's wildly eccentric punctuation and startling syntax make just the right verbal vehicle for this dark-hearted pirate story for grownups.
Hughes enjoys some coy riffing on the child mind, as with this description of the way Emily handles an uncomfortable social situation: "Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck." Even so, Hughes never sentimentalizes his subject: "Babies of course are not human--they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes." Children, as a race, are given rough treatment: "their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)." That madness is here isolated, prodded, and poked to chilling effect. But Hughes never loses sight of his ultimate objective: A High Wind in Jamaica is, above all, a cracking good yarn. --Claire Dederer [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jakob Von Gunten'
The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Bal Du Comte D'Orgel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Love in a Fallen City'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mawrdew Czgowchwz'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Memoirs of My Nervous Illness'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Month in the Country'
Any good reader has, well, had it with novels of healing. The culture of confession has given rise to novels that begin with an unspeakable act (graphically described) and end in redemption (this part is usually more vague). That's not how it works in J.L. Carr's quiet, brief, dreamy A Month in the Country. Writing in 1978, Carr's narrator, Tom Birkin, recalls the summer of 1920. A veteran of the Great War and a cuckold, Tom arrives in Oxgodby to restore a medieval mural in the church. His single season in this town in the north of England passes quickly: he sleeps in the belfry, makes a friend or two, falls secretly in love with the vicar's wife, and, chipping away at plaster and dirt, uncovers a lost masterpiece. These events seem to melt past Tom in the heat of the perfect, fleeting English summer: "The front gardens of cottages were crammed with marjoram and roses, marguerites, sweet William, at night heavy with the scent of stocks. The Vale was heavy with leaves, motionless in the early morning, black caves of shadow in the midday heat, blurring the sound of trains hammering north and south."
Carr devotes many fewer words to Tom's time in the war. The vicar's wife tries to ask him about it. "'What about hell on earth?' she said. I told her I'd seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they usually left an exit open." His healing consists of not talking about his past--perhaps a revolutionary notion these days. A Month in the Country, with its paean to a lost, good place, oddly recalls Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. But where that novel was elliptical, Carr's work values clarity and simplicity above all. These are rare enough qualities, but to find them in a novel of romance and healing is a rarer pleasure still. --Claire Dederer [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris Stories: Library Edition'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Peking Story : The First 2 Years under the Red Star'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Play of Hadrian VII'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist'
In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The act was intended both as retribution for the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike and as an incitement to revolution. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prisonone that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner'
Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, James Hogg's masterpiece is a brilliant psychological study of religious fanaticism and the power of evil. Led on by his sinister companion, Gil-Martin, Robert Wringhim commits a series of atrocious crimes. As the novel progresses, however, and the complexity of Wringhim's mind is revealed, the reader begins to doubt whether Gil-Martin even exists. This edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner places the work within the context of Calvinism, Scottish political and constitutional history, and early psychological theories of "double consciousness." A wide-ranging introduction discusses the novel in relation to its setting as well as to the period in which it was composed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Private Memoirs And Confessions of a Justified Sinner'
THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS
AND CONFESSIONS
OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
WITH A DETAIL OF CURIOUS TRADITIONARY FACTS, AND
OTHER EVIDENCE, BY THE EDITOR
By
James Hogg
[via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Private Memoirs of a Justified Sinner'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography'
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, self-appointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated aspirant to the priesthood with a bottomless talent for self-destruction. But this singular work, subtitled "an experiment in biography," is also a remarkable self-portrait, a study of the obsession and sympathy that inspires the biographer's art. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Robert Burton's the Anatomy of Melancholy: Commentary Up to Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 15, 'Misery of Schollers''
This is the fourth volume of the Clarendon edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the first of three volumes of Commentary. It tracks down more of Burton's sources and allusions than any previous edition and explains and translates all Latin passages. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962'
Originally published in 1987, a new edition of an examination of the Algerian War of 1954-1962, which describes how the conflict saw the death of an estimated million Muslim Algerians and the expulsion of the same number of European settlers from the region. Includes an updated epilogue covering the violent Algerian elections in 1995. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Siege of Krishnapur'
"The first sign of trouble at Krishnapur came with a mysterious distribution of chapatis, made of coarse flour and about the size and thickness of a biscuit; towards the end of February 1857, they swept the countryside like an epidemic."
Students of history will recognize 1857 as the year of the Sepoy rebellion in India--an uprising of native soldiers against the British, brought on by Hindu and Muslim recruits' belief that the rifle cartridges they were provided had been greased with pig or cow fat. This seminal event in Anglo-Indian relations provides the backdrop for J.G. Farrell's Booker Prize-winning exploration of race, culture, and class, The Siege of Krishnapur.
Like the mysteriously appearing chapatis, life in British India seems, on the surface, innocuous enough. Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians' daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class consciousness, and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away. When Krishnapur itself is finally attacked, the Europeans withdraw inside the grounds of the Residency where very soon conditions begin to deteriorate: food and water run out, disease is rampant, people begin to go a little mad. Soon the very proper British are reduced to eating insects and consorting across class lines. Farrell's descriptions of life inside the Residency are simultaneously horrifying and blackly humorous. The siege, for example, is conducted under the avid eyes of the local populace, who clearly anticipate an enjoyable massacre and thus arrive every morning laden with picnic lunches (plainly visible to the starving Europeans). By turns witty and compassionate, The Siege of Krishnapur comprises the best of all fictional worlds: unforgettable characters, an epic adventure, and at its heart a cultural clash for the ages. Quite simply, this is a splendid novel. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sleepless Nights'
In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her lifethe parade of people, the shifting background of placeand assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenants of Moonbloom'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenants of Moonbloom'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Towers of Trebizond'
This story describes the experiences of a group of people on a trip to Turkey. Aunt Dot is set on the emancipation of Turkish women through the encouragement of a wider use of the bathing hat, whilst Laurie's only object is pleasure. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Troubles'
Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize
1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles."
Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Unpossessed'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Walter Benjamin : The Story of a Friendship'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walter Benjamin the Story of a Friend'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte E. Freundschaft'
Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationshipÑwhich was to remain crucial for both menÑis both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940.
At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Waste Books'
German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes and aphorisms that he collected in what he called his Waste Books. With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions.
Lichtenberg's Waste Books have been greatly admired by writers as very different as Tolstoy, Einstein, and Andre Breton, while Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledged them as a significant inspiration for their own radical work in philosophy. The record of a brilliant and subtle mind in action, The Waste Books are above all a powerful testament to the necessity, and pleasure, of unfettered thought. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Way of Life, Like Any Other'
The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too.
Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the rightor wrongman, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age storya novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect. [via]
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