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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Innocence'
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York. With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.
This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay'
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beloved'
Toni Morrison gently reads her own Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the unabridged version of this riveting tale of ex-slave Sethe and the beloved ghost that haunts her. While Morrison makes occasional odd pauses in her reading, what is lost in smoothness is more than made up for in quiet intensity as the author reads words obviously deeply felt. Her intimate knowledge of the characters and their motivations lends this reading an authority that helps the listener sort out the breaks in time and dialogue in this complex story of a woman coming to terms with her enslaved past and the loss of her husband and baby daughter. (Running time: 12 hours, eight cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Confederacy of Dunces'
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Lana Lee and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire Falls'
Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time, though, the author has widened his scope, producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece. There is, to be sure, a protagonist: fortysomething Miles Robey, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. But Russo sets in motion a large cast of secondary characters, drawn from every social stratum of his depressed New England mill town. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max (another of Russo's cantankerous layabouts), and a host of Empire Grill regulars. We're also introduced to Francine Whiting, a manipulative widow who owns half the town--and who takes a perverse pleasure in pointing out Miles' psychological defects.
Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. And his role as Mr Nice Guy thrusts him into all sorts of clashes with his not-so-nice contemporaries, even as the reader patiently waits for him to blow his top. It would be impossible to summarise Russo's multiple plot lines here. Suffice it to say that he touches on love and marriage, lust and loss and small-town economics, with more than a soupcon of class resentment stirred into the broth. This is, in a sense, an epic of small and large frustrations: "After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?" Yet Russo's comedic timing keeps the novel from collapsing into an orgy of breast-beating, and his dialogue--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is itself sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis, Amazon.com [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A guide to reading ""To Kill A Mockingbird"" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird'
Plot synopsis of this classic is made meaningful with analysis and quotes by noted literary critics, summaries of the work's main themes and characters, a sketch of the author's life and times, a bibliography, suggested test questions, and ideas for essays and term papers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hours'
The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Marie and Bruce: A Play'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matar UN Ruisenor/to Kill a Mockingbird'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Middlesex'
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." & I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shipping News'
When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just desserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out."
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.
Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las asombrosas aventuras de Kavalier Y Clay/ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Conjura De Los Necios'
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologia y geometria" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces'
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologiÂa y geometriÂa" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matar UN Ruisenor/to Kill a Mockingbird'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Ore'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Studen'
Die Stunden ist eine Hommage an Virginia Woolf und zugleich ein sehr eigenständiges Werk. Während Michael Cunningham sein literarisches Idol zu neuem Leben erweckt, verflechtet er ihre Geschichte mit denen von zwei weiteren, eher zeitgenössischen Frauen. Eines grauen Morgens im Jahre 1923, in einem Vorort von London, erwacht Woolf von einem Traum, der bald zu ihrem Roman Mrs. Dalloway führen sollte. In der Gegenwart, an einem schönen Junitag in Greenwich Village in New York, bereitet die 52-jährige Clarissa Vaughan eine Party für ihre alte Liebe vor, einen Dichter, der an Aids stirbt. Und in Los Angeles im Jahre 1949 bemüht sich die schwangere und ruhelose Laura Brown so gut sie kann, sich für den Geburtstag ihres Mannes zurecht zu machen, kann aber irgendwie nicht aufhören, Woolf zu lesen. Das Leben dieser drei Frauen verbindet sowohl der Roman aus dem Jahre 1925 als auch die wenigen kostbaren Momente der Möglichkeit, zu denen sie alle immer wieder zurückkehren. Clarissa wird irgendwann zu folgender Feststellung kommen: "Als Trost gibt es nur dies: hier und da eine Stunde, wenn unser Leben -- entgegen aller Erwartungen -- sich zu öffnen scheint und uns alles schenkt, was wir uns jemals gewünscht haben... Trotzdem, wir lieben die Stadt, den Morgen; wir hoffen, mehr als alles andere, mehr zu bekommen."
Wenn Cunningham zwischen den drei Frauen hin- und herwechselt, sind die Übergänge völlig nahtlos. Ein Kapitel am Anfang des Buches endet damit, dass Woolf ihren Stift nimmt und ihren ersten Satz schreibt: "Mrs. Dalloway sagte, sie würde die Blumen selbst kaufen." Das nächste Kapitel beginnt damit, dass sich Laura an diesem Satz und an der literarischen Welt erfreut, in die sie gerade im Begriff ist, sich zu begeben. Clarissas Tag ist, auf der anderen Seite, ein Spiegelbild von Mrs. Dalloways -- allerdings mit einem entsprechenden Maß an moderner Angleichung, da Cunningham seine Quelle der Inspiration aktualisiert und ausfeilt. Clarissa weiß, daß ihr Wunsch, ihrem Freund eine perfekte Party zu bieten, für viele trivial erscheinen mag. Sie findet das jedoch besser, als sich dem Unglück und der Verzweiflung zu verschließen. Wie seine literarische Inspiration ist Die Stunden eine Hymne an das Bewusstsein und an die Schönheit und die Verluste, die man damit wahrnimmt. Es erinnert uns auch daran -- wie uns Cunningham immer wieder bewusst macht -- dass Kunst bei weitem nicht nur "der Welt der Gegenstände" angehört. --Kerry Fried [via]
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