| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
books tagged “social commentary” (Social commentary)
books tagged “social commentary”
›› Find signed collectible books by ''
English
-
Absalom, Absalom!by William FaulknerISBN 0375508724 (0-375-50872-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Absalom, Absalom!'Book summary:Absalom! Absalom! is William Faulkners major work--his most important and ambitious contribution to American literature. In the dramatic texture of this story of the founding, flourishing and decay of the plantation of Sutpen's Hundred, and of the family that demonic Stephen Sutpen brought into the world a generation before the Civil War, there rises the lament of the South for its own vanished splendor. From its magnificent and bold inception, when with his wild Negroes the founder of the great plantation appeared out of nowhere to seize his hundred square miles of land and build his mansion, through the destruction of the Civil War and its aftermath, and the drab beginnings of the new South, the narrative is colored by the authors glowing imagery, his command of a powerful and magical prose style. Beneath its brilliant surface and dark undercurrents, the novel sweeps backward and forward through time. The story in all its ramifications becomes crystallized in the mind of a relative of this strange family, young Quentin Compson, a Harvard student. At the terrifying and abrupt end of the tale there remain in the crumbling shell of the old house only the dying son of its builder, an ancient Negro woman who had been his slave, and the idiot mulatto youth who was to be the only direct descendant of the Sutpen blood.
This edition is set from the first American edition of 1936 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]More editions of Absalom, Absalom!:
-
Against Interpretation: And Other Essaysby Susan SontagISBN 0385267088 (0-385-26708-8)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Against Interpretation: And Other Essays'Book summary:The first collection of essays by the brilliant critic and writer to be published in book form, containing her best writings between 1961 and 1965. [via]
More editions of Against Interpretation: And Other Essays:
-
Alice's Adventures In Wonderlandby Lewis Carroll, John TennielISBN 0375761381 (0-375-76138-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice's Adventures In Wonderland'Book summary:That Alice. When she's not traipsing after a rabbit into Wonderland, she's gallivanting off into the topsy-turvy world behind the drawing-room looking glass. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's masterful and zany sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she makes more eccentric acquaintances, including Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Queen, and a somewhat grumpy Humpty Dumpty. Through a giant and elaborate chess game, Alice explores this odd country, where one must eat dry biscuits to quench thirst, and run like the wind to stay in one place. As in life, Alice must stay on her toes to learn the rules of this game. Through the Looking Glass immediately took its rightful place beside its partner on the shelf of eternal classics. And luckily for generations of enraptured children, Carroll was again able to persuade John Tenniel to create the fantastic woodblock engravings that have become so indelibly associated with the Alice stories. For almost 130 years, Alice's curious adventures have amused, perplexed, and delighted readers, young and old. This gorgeous, deluxe boxed set of both volumes contains engravings from Tenniel's original woodblocks that were discovered in a London bank in 1985, and reproduced for the first time here. "'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures?'" What indeed? (All ages) [via]
More editions of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland:
-
The Amber Spyglassby Philip PullmanISBN 0375823352 (0-375-82335-2)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Amber Spyglass'Book summary:From the very start of its very first scene, The Amber Spyglass will set hearts fluttering and minds racing. All we'll say here is that we immediately discover who captured Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, though we've yet to discern whether this individual's intent is good, evil, or somewhere in between. We also learn that Will still possesses the blade that allows him to cut between worlds, and has been joined by two winged companions who are determined to escort him to Lord Asriel's mountain redoubt. The boy, however, has only one goal in mind--to rescue his friend and return to her the alethiometer, an instrument that has revealed so much to her and to readers of The Golden Compass and its follow-up. Within a short time, too, we get to experience the "tingle of the starlight" on Serafina Pekkala's skin as she seeks out a famished Iorek Byrnison and enlists him in Lord Asriel's crusade:
A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.
Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task."In the final installment of his trilogy, Philip Pullman has set himself the highest hurdles. He must match its predecessors in terms of sheer action and originality and resolve the enigmas he already created. The good news is that there is no critical bad news--not that The Amber Spyglass doesn't contain standoffs and close calls galore. (Who would have it otherwise?) But Pullman brings his audacious revision of Paradise Lost to a conclusion that is both serene and devastating. In prose that is transparent yet lyrical and 3-D, the author weaves in and out of his principals' thoughts. He also offers up several additional worlds. In one, Dr. Mary Malone is welcomed into an apparently simple society. The environment of the mulefa (again, we'll reveal nothing more) makes them rich in consciousness while their lives possess a slow and stately rhythm. These strange creatures can, however, be very fast on their feet (or on other things entirely) when necessary. Alas, they are on the verge of dying as Dust streams out of their idyllic landscape. Will the Oxford dark-matter researcher see her way to saving them, or does this require our young heroes? And while Mary is puzzling out a cure, Will and Lyra undertake a pilgrimage to a realm devoid of all light and hope, after having been forced into the cruelest of sacrifices--or betrayals.
Throughout his galvanizing epic, Pullman sustains scenes of fierce beauty and tenderness. He also allows us a moment or two of comic respite. At one point, for instance, Lyra's mother bullies a series of ecclesiastical underlings: "The man bowed helplessly and led her away. The guard behind her blew out his cheeks with relief." Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is as intoxicating and fluid as ever. And can it be that we will come to admire her as she plays out her desperate endgame? In this respect, as in many others, The Amber Spyglass is truly a book of revelations, moving from darkness visible to radiant truth. --Kerry Fried [via]
-
American Godsby Neil GaimanISBN 0380789035 (0-380-78903-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'American Gods'Book summary:American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton [via]
-
Among Schoolchildrenby Tracy KidderISBN 0380710897 (0-380-71089-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Among Schoolchildren'Book summary:Tracy Kidder -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine and the extraordinary national bestseller House -- spent nine months in Mrs. Zajac's fifth-grade classroom in the depressed "Flats" of Holyoke, Massachusetts. For an entire year he lived among twenty schoolchildren and their indomitable, compassionate teacher -- sharings their joys, their catastrophes, and their small but essential triumphs. As a result, he has written a revealing, remarkably poignant account of education in America . . . and his most memorable, emotionally charged, and important book to date.
[via]More editions of Among Schoolchildren:
-
Anil's Ghostby Michael OndaatjeISBN 0375724370 (0-375-72437-0)
Softcover, Vintage Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Anil's Ghost'Book summary:With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.
Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past-a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder-Michael Ondaatje's most powerful novel yet. [via] -
Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmatesby Erving GoffmanISBN 0385000162 (0-385-00016-2)
Softcover, Doubleday
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates'Book summary:Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside. [via]
More editions of Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates:
-
The Awakeningby Kate ChopinISBN 0380002450 (0-380-00245-0)
Softcover, Avon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening'Book summary:"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before." [via]
More editions of The Awakening:
-
Babbittby Sinclair Lewis, Richard LingemanISBN 0375759255 (0-375-75925-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Babbitt'Book summary:In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewiss prominence as a social commentator.
Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitts secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over. [via]More editions of Babbitt:
-
The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, the Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianismby John Stuart Mill, J. B. SchneewindISBN 0375759182 (0-375-75918-2)
Softcover, Modern Library
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, the Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism'Book summary:The writings of John Stuart Mill have become the cornerstone of political liberalism. Collected for the first time in this volume are Mills three seminal and most widely read works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism. A brilliant defense of individual rights versus the power of the state, On Liberty is essential reading for anyone interested in political thought and theory. As Bertrand Russell reflected, On Liberty remains a classic . . . the present world would be better than it is, if [Mills] principles were more respected.
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes newly commissioned endnotes and commentary by Dale E. Miller, and an index. [via]More editions of The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, the Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism:
Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coastby Mike TidwellISBN 0375725172 (0-375-72517-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast'More editions of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast:
-
The Beautiful and Damnedby F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hortense CalisherISBN 0375759646 (0-375-75964-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beautiful and Damned'Book summary:Introduction by Hortense Calisher
[via]
Commentary by Edmund Wilson, Henry Seidel Canby, and Arthur Mizener
Fitzgeralds second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy. Published on the heels of This Side of Paradise, the story of the Harvard-educated aesthete Anthony Patch and his willful wife, Gloria, is propelled by Fitzgeralds intense romantic imagination and demonstrates an increased technical and emotional maturity. The Beautiful and Damned is at once a gripping morality tale, a rueful meditation on love, marriage, and money, and an acute social document. As Hortense Calisher observes in her Introduction, Though Fitzgerald can entrance with stories so joyfully youthful they appear to be safewhen he cuts himself, you will bleed.
Includes a Modern Library Reading Group GuideMore editions of The Beautiful and Damned:
-
Bill Moyers' World of Ideas Anthology Collection : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Futureby Bill MoyersISBN 0385263465 (0-385-26346-5)
Softcover, Broadway Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bill Moyers' World of Ideas Anthology Collection : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future'Book summary:Conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future. Bill Moyers brings us one-on-one interviews with forty-two extraordinary men and women--poets and physicists, historians and novelists, doctors and philosophers--discussing what's happening in our lives, our hearts, and our minds as we approach a new millenium. [via]
More editions of Bill Moyers' World of Ideas Anthology Collection : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future:
-
Bill Moyers' World of Ideas : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Futureby Bill MoyersISBN 0385262787 (0-385-26278-7)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bill Moyers' World of Ideas : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future'Book summary:Conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future. Bill Moyers brings us one-on-one interviews with forty-two extraordinary men and women--poets and physicists, historians and novelists, doctors and philosophers--discussing what's happening in our lives, our hearts, and our minds as we approach a new millenium. [via]
More editions of Bill Moyers' World of Ideas : Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future:
-
Bleak Houseby Charles DickensISBN 0375760059 (0-375-76005-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bleak House'Book summary:Bleak House is a satirical look at the Byzantine legal system in London as it consumes the minds and talents of the greedy and nearly destroys the lives of innocents--a contemporary tale indeed. Dickens's tale takes us from the foggy dank streets of London and the maze of the Inns of Court to the peaceful countryside of England. Likewise, the characters run from murderous villains to virtuous girls, from a devoted lover to a "fallen woman," all of whom are affected by a legal suit in which there will, of course, be no winner. The first-person narrative related by the orphan Esther is particularly sweet. The articulate reading by the acclaimed British actor Paul Scofield, whose distinctive broad English accent lends just the right degree of sonority and humor to the text, brings out the color in this classic social commentary disguised as a Victorian drama. However, to abridge Dickens is, well, a Dickensian task, the results of which make for a story in which the author's convoluted plot lines and twists of fate play out in what seems to be a fast-forward format. Listeners must pay close attention in order to keep up with the multiple narratives and cast of curious characters, including the memorable Inspector Bucket and Mr. Guppy. Fortunately, the publisher provides a partial list of characters on the inside jacket. (Running time: 3 hours; 2 cassettes) [via]
More editions of Bleak House:
Break, Blow, Burnby Camille PagliaISBN 0375725393 (0-375-72539-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Break, Blow, Burn'More editions of Break, Blow, Burn:
Bucking the Sargeby Christopher Paul CurtisISBN 0385323077 (0-385-32307-7)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bucking the Sarge'More editions of Bucking the Sarge:
-
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Futureby Neil PostmanISBN 0375701273 (0-375-70127-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future'Book summary:The problem with the world today, says Neil Postman, is that we've become so caught up in hurtling towards the future that we've lost our societal "narrative," a humane cultural tradition that creates "a sense of purpose and continuity"--in other words, something to believe in. "In order to have an agreeable encounter with the twenty-first century," he asserts, "we will have to take into it some good ideas. And in order to do that, we need to look back to take stock of the good ideas available to us." He finds rich source material in the Enlightenment, the salad days for philosophers such as Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, and Jefferson, "the beginnings of much that is worthwhile about the modern world." Yet Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is a call for cultural progress, not regression: "I am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century," Postman notes, "only that we use it for what it is worth and all it is worth."
Chief among the values Postman cites is the development of the intellect; it plays a part in many of his recommendations, from the cultivation of a healthy skepticism towards overhyped technology to sweeping educational reforms that include replacing grammar instruction with logic and rhetoric and introducing courses on comparative religion and the history of science. He also lashes out at postmodernists who start with the premise that language "is a major factor in producing our perceptions, judgments, knowledge, and institutions" and conclude that language is therefore tenuously connected to reality at best. Enlightenment thinkers knew that language molded perception, he notes, but they also believed that "it is possible to use language to say things about the world that are true" and "to communicate ideas to oneself and to others." Postman is excessively curmudgeonly at times, as in his reference to philosopher Jean Baudrillard as "a Frenchman, of all things," or his remarks on the ancient Athenians: "I know they are the classic example of Dead White Males, but we should probably listen to them anyway." But for anybody with a stake in the culture wars, or who wants to apply the lessons of philosophy to the modern world, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century will make for provocative reading. [via]
More editions of Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future:
Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's Americaby Molly Ivins, Lou DuboseISBN 0375713115 (0-375-71311-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America'More editions of Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America:
The Complete Fairy Tales and Storiesby H. C. Andersen, Erik Christian HaugaardISBN 0385019017 (0-385-01901-7)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories'Book summary:Translated by Erik Hougaard, this is the only version available in trade paperback that presents the fairy tales exactly as Andersen collected them in the original Danish edition in 1874. His notes accompany the text. [via]
More editions of The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories:
-
The Cost of Livingby Arundhati RoyISBN 0375756140 (0-375-75614-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cost of Living'Book summary:From the bestselling author of The God of Small Things comes a scathing and passionate indictment of big government's
disregard for the individual.
In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family in India. Now she lavishes the same acrobatic language and fierce humanity on the future of her beloved country. In this spirited polemic, Roy dares to take on two of the great illusions of India's progress: the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age--but which instead have displaced untold millions--and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb, with all its attendant Faustian bargains.
Merging her inimitable voice with a great moral outrage and imaginative sweep, Roy peels away the mask of democracy and prosperity to show the true costs hidden beneath. For those who have been mesmerized by her vision of India, here is a sketch, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrificed for the comforts of the few. [via]More editions of The Cost of Living:
-
The Death and Life of Great American Citiesby Jane JacobsISBN 0375508732 (0-375-50873-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'Book summary:This book is an attack on current methods of city planning and re-building. It is also an explanation of new principles and an argument for different methods from those now in use. It is the first real alternative to conventional city planning that we have had in this century. Its author, herself a city dweller and an editor of Architectural Forum, is direct and practical in her approach. What, she asks, makes cities work? Why are some neighborhoods full of things to do and see and why are others dull? Why does the crime rate soar in our public housing developments and why are some of our older neighborhoods, despite their evident pov-erty, so much more safe, stable and congenial? Why do some neighborhoods attract interested and responsible populations and why do others degenerate? Why are Boston's North End and the eastern and western extremes of Greenwich Village good neighborhoods and why do orthodox city planners consider them slums? What alternatives are there to current city planning and rebuilding?
Conventional city planning holds that cities decline because they are blighted by too many people, by mixtures of commercial, industrial and residential uses, by old buildings and narrow streets and by small landholders who stand in the way of large-scale development. Such neighborhoods, they insist, breed apathy and crime, discourage investment and contaminate the areas around them. The response of con-ventional city planning is to tear them down, scatter their inhabitants, lay out super-blocks, and rebuild the area accord-ing to an integrated plan, with the result, as often as not, that the crime rate rises still higher, the new neighborhood is more lifeless than the old one, and the surrounding areas deteriorate even more, until the life of the whole city is threatened.
But Mrs. Jacobs observes that in any number of cases these very conditions--mixed uses, dense population, old buildings, small blocks, decentralized ownership--create the very opposite of slums, neighborhoods that regenerate themselves spontaneously, that are full of variety and diversity, that attract large numbers of casual visitors and responsible new residents, that encourage investment and revitalize the areas around them. Boston's North End (condemned as a slum by or-thodox planners) is such a neighborhood, and so is Greenwich Village. Rittenhouse Square and Telegraph Hill are others. Nearly every large city can produce still other examples.
Why then do some city neighborhoods die and why do others flourish? And what can city planners do to avoid the death and encourage the life of our great American cities? The solutions proposed by Mrs. Jacobs in this book represent a sharp break with conventional thinking on the subject and they carry with them the ring of simple truth which marks this book as an inevitable classic of social thought.
This edition is set from the first American edition of 1961 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]More editions of The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
-
Dhalgrenby Samuel R. DelanyISBN 0375706682 (0-375-70668-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dhalgren'Book summary:What is Dhalgren? Dhalgren is one of the greatest novels of 20th-century American literature. Dhalgren is one of the all-time bestselling science fiction novels. Dhalgren may be read with equal validity as SF, magic realism, or metafiction. Dhalgren is controversial, challenging, and scandalous. Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.
A mysterious disaster has stricken the midwestern American city of Bellona, and its aftereffects are disturbing: a city block burns down and is intact a week later; clouds cover the sky for weeks, then part to reveal two moons; a week passes for one person when only a day passes for another. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.
Dhalgren is many things, but instantly accessible isn't one of them. While most of this big, ambitious, deeply detailed novel is beautifully pellucid, the opening pages will be difficult for some: the novel starts with the second half of an incomplete sentence, in the viewpoint of a man who doesn't know who he is. If you find the early pages rough going, push on; the story soon becomes clear and fascinating. But--fair warning--the central nature of the disaster, of its strange devastations and disruptions, remains a puzzle for many readers, sometimes after several readings.
Spoiler warning: If you want to figure out the secret of the novel as you read Dhalgren, then stop reading this review right now! If you want to know the secret before you start, this is what the novel is about: the experience of existence inside a novel. Time passes differently for different characters. A river changes location. Stairs change their number. The Kid looks in a mirror and sees not himself, but someone who looks an awful lot like Samuel R. Delany. Central images include mirrors, lenses, and prisms, devices that focus, reflect--and distort. The Kid fills a notebook with a journal that may be Dhalgren, and is uncertain if he has written much, or any, of it. The characters don't know they're in a novel, but they know something is wrong. Dhalgren explores the relationship between characters and author (or, perhaps, characters, "author," and author).
The final chapter can be even tougher going than the opening pages, with its viewpoint change and its stretches of braided narrative--and the novel ends with the beginning of an unfinished sentence. But the last chapter becomes clear as you persevere; and when you get to that unfinished closing line, turn to the first line of the novel to finish the sentence and close the narrative circle. --Cynthia Ward [via]
More editions of Dhalgren:
-
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paperby Nicholson BakerISBN 0375726217 (0-375-72621-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper'Book summary:The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our countrys librariesincluding the Library of Congresshave been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.
With meticulous detective work and Bakers well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archiveall twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system. [via]More editions of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper:
-
Dr. Bloodmoneyby Philip K. DickISBN 0375719296 (0-375-71929-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dr. Bloodmoney'Book summary:Dr. Bloodmoney is a post-nuclear-holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dicks most memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; Dr. Bluthgeld, the megalomaniac physicist largely responsible for the decimated state of the world; and Stuart McConchie and Bonnie Keller, two unremarkable people bent the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil. Epic and alluring, this brilliant novel is a mesmerizing depiction of Dicks undying hope in humanity. [via]
More editions of Dr. Bloodmoney:
Ecology of Fearby Mike DavisISBN 0375706070 (0-375-70607-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ecology of Fear'More editions of Ecology of Fear:
The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Ownersby Debra J. DickersonISBN 0375713190 (0-375-71319-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners'More editions of The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners:
-
The Executioner's Songby Norman MailerISBN 0375700811 (0-375-70081-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Executioner's Song'Book summary:The Executioner's Song is a work of unprecedented force. It is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty. Gilmore, a violent yet articulate man who chose not to fight his death-penalty sentence, touched off a national debate about capital punishment. He allowed Norman Mailer and researcher Lawrence Schiller complete access to his story. Mailer took the material and produced an immense book with a dry, unwavering voice and meticulous attention to detail on Gilmore's life--particularly his relationship with Nicole Baker, whom Gilmore claims to have killed. What unfolds is a powerful drama, a distorted love affair, and a chilling look into the mind of a murderer in his countdown with a firing squad. [via]
More editions of The Executioner's Song:
Fate of the Earthby Jonathan SchellISBN 0380613255 (0-380-61325-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fate of the Earth'More editions of Fate of the Earth:
-
Flute Song Magicby Andrea ShettleISBN 0380762250 (0-380-76225-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Flute Song Magic'Book summary:Seen a lot of love -- OK condition. Love it or your money back. Ships from historic Eastern Market in Washington, DC. Enjoy! [via]
More editions of Flute Song Magic:
-
For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Todayby Jedediah PurdyISBN 0375706917 (0-375-70691-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today'Book summary:Jedediah Purdy is only in his mid-20s, but there are times when, working your way through Purdy's precisely crafted sentences, you would swear that the author is an old man. The problem with the world today, Purdy says, is that too many of us have withdrawn from it. "Often it begins in ironic avoidance," he writes, "the studied refusal to trust or hope openly. Elsewhere it comes from reckless credulity, the embrace of a tissue of illusions bound together by untested hope." He urges a revitalization of the notion of public responsibility, "the active preservation of things that we must hold in common or, eventually, lose altogether." Purdy is well aware that politics, the most visible of the public arenas, is nowadays regarded as a training ground for opportunists and hypocrites. But he insists that if we invest our lives with a dignity rooted in "the harmony of commitment, knowledge, and work," even politics might be restored.
For Common Things is quick to make pronouncements along the lines of "Today's young people are adept with phrases that reduce personality to symptoms," without mentioning that it was their therapy-happy baby boomer parents who introduced words like passive-aggressive and repressed into their vocabulary--and without broaching the possibility that it was the combined failure of the '60s counterculture movement and the loss of faith in government attendant to the Watergate scandal that nurtured cynicism and ironic detachment within the boomers. (Well, perhaps solving the problem is more important than assigning the blame.) At times, the Harvard-educated author's erudition gets the best of him, and his prose takes on a certain academic stiffness. (One wonders, at such moments, if perhaps the book has its roots in a senior thesis.) But when Purdy focuses on personal matters related to his homeschooled West Virginia upbringing, one can detect traces of a passion and intensity that would be well worth developing in future writings. Which is not to say that Purdy doesn't feel strongly about the restoration of civic commitment; this book stands as proof that he does. But anybody can--and many people do--make impersonal assessments of the state of the world; there is a story, however, that only Jedediah Purdy can tell us about community and responsibility. The traces of that story in For Common Things may leave many readers clamoring for more details. --Ron Hogan [via]
More editions of For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today:
-
Frankensteinby Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyISBN 0375753419 (0-375-75341-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Frankenstein'Book summary:Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image & but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates. [via]
More editions of Frankenstein:
-
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewaterby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385333471 (0-385-33347-1)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'Book summary:Vonnegut's satirical voice has been likened to a 20th c. counterpart of Mark Twain. Don't miss the ascerbic wit from the award-winning author of "Slaughterhouse 5" & "Cat's Cradle." BEST PRICE on the market. Will mail out within 12 hrs. of payment confirmation. [via]
More editions of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
-
The Good Motherby Sue MillerISBN 0385312431 (0-385-31243-1)
Softcover, Dell Publishing
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Mother'Book summary:Sue Miller's critically acclaimed bestseller, The Good Mother, is now being reissued in trade paperback. This thought-provoking and powerful novel asks the question, "to whom is a woman more deeply bound--the man she loves, or her own child?" [via]
More editions of The Good Mother:
-
Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens, Bernard ShawISBN 0375757015 (0-375-75701-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'Book summary:Introduction by George Bernard Shaw Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations-until he is inexplicably elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters-including a terrifying convict named Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham, and her beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. "Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language," according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, "Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero." INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE [via]
More editions of Great Expectations:
Hans Andersenby H. C. Andersen, Michael Foreman, Erik Christian HaugaardISBN 0385133642 (0-385-13364-2)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hans Andersen'More editions of Hans Andersen:
-
Hans Christian Andersen the Complete Fairy Tales and Storiesby H. C. Andersen, Virginia HavilandISBN 0385189516 (0-385-18951-6)
Softcover, Anchor Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hans Christian Andersen the Complete Fairy Tales and Stories'Book summary:Translated by Erik Hougaard, this is the only version available in trade paperback that presents the fairy tales exactly as Andersen collected them in the original Danish edition in 1874. His notes accompany the text. [via]
More editions of Hans Christian Andersen the Complete Fairy Tales and Stories:
-
Hazard of New Fortunesby William Dean Howells, David J. Nordloh, Arthur Meier SchlesingerISBN 0375759271 (0-375-75927-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hazard of New Fortunes'Book summary:Centering on a conflict between a self-made millionaire and an idealistic reformer in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes insightfully renders the complexities of the American experience at a time of great social and economic upheaval and transformation. In its depiction of wealth, poverty, and New York City life, it remains a strikingly contemporary work.
Reproduced here is the authoritative Indiana University Press Edition edited and annotated by David J. Nordloh, with full scholarly commentary and extensive textual apparatus. [via]More editions of Hazard of New Fortunes:
Houseby Tracy KidderISBN 0380701766 (0-380-70176-6)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'House'Book summary:In House, a New York Times hardcover bestseller for over six months, Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges and triumphs. [via]
-
The Illustrated Manby Ray BradburyISBN 0380973847 (0-380-97384-7)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Illustrated Man'Book summary:That The Illustrated Man has remained in print since being published in 1951 is fair testimony to the universal appeal of Ray Bradbury's work. Only his second collection (the first was Dark Carnival, later reworked into The October Country), it is a marvelous, if mostly dark, quilt of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In an ingenious framework to open and close the book, Bradbury presents himself as a nameless narrator who meets the Illustrated Man--a wanderer whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos. What's even more remarkable, and increasingly disturbing, is that the illustrations are themselves magically alive, and each proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge. Or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere--without the benefit of a spaceship. Or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally--our own children. Even though most were written in the 1940s and 1950s, these 18 classic stories will be just as chillingly effective 50 years from now. --Stanley Wiater [via]
-
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequencesby Truman CapoteISBN 0375507906 (0-375-50790-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences'Book summary:"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]
More editions of In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences:
-
The Invisible Manby Ralph EllisonISBN 0375507914 (0-375-50791-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invisible Man'Book summary:We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak [via]
More editions of The Invisible Man:
-
Jane Eyreby Charlotte Brontë, Diane JohnsonISBN 0375757600 (0-375-75760-0)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Eyre'Book summary:Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre erupted onto the English literary scene, immediately winning the devotion of many of the world's most renowned writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, who declared it a work "of great genius." Passionate, dramatic, and surprisingly modern, Jane Eyre endures as one of the world's most beloved novels. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes a new Introduction by Diane Johnson, the National Book Award-nominated author of many novels, including Le Mariage and Le Divorce.
The timeless story of Jane Eyre has arrived on Broadway as a spectacular new musical from an all-star production team, consisting of John Caird (Les Misérables, Nicholas Nickleby), who adapted and staged (with Scott Schwartz); composer Paul Gordon; designer John Napier (Cats, Les Misérables, Sunset Boulevard); costume designer Andreane Neofitou (Les Misérables, Miss Saigon); and lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, six-time winners of the Tonytm Award.
Jane Eyre: The Musical, live at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre
www.JaneEyreonBroadway.com
Original cast album available from Sony Classical [via]More editions of Jane Eyre:
Jerusalem: Song of Songsby Leon Uris, Jill UrisISBN 0385148631 (0-385-14863-1)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jerusalem: Song of Songs'More editions of Jerusalem: Song of Songs:
-
Jonathan Livingston Seagullby Richard BachISBN 0380012863 (0-380-01286-3)
Softcover, Avon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull'Book summary:"Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight--how to get from shore to food and back again," writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight." Flight is indeed the metaphor that makes the story soar. Ultimately this is a fable about the importance of seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe, or neighborhood finds your ambition threatening. (At one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock.) By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan gets the ultimate payoff: transcendence. Ultimately, he learns the meaning of love and kindness. The dreamy seagull photographs by Russell Munson provide just the right illustrations--although the overall packaging does seem a bit dated (keep in mind that it was first published in 1970). Nonetheless, this is a spirituality classic, and an especially engaging parable for adolescents. --Gail Hudson [via]
More editions of Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
-
Jude the Obscureby Thomas HardyISBN 0375757414 (0-375-75741-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Jude the Obscure'Book summary:Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned. The experience so exhausted Hardy that he never wrote a work of fiction again.
Rich in symbolism, Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley and his struggle to rise from his station as a poor Wessex stonemason to that of a scholar at Christminster. It is also the story of Judes ill-fated relationship with his cousin Sue Bridehead, and the ultimate tragedy that causes Judes undoing and Sues transformation. Jude the Obscure explores mans essential loneliness and remains one of Hardys most widely read novels. [via]More editions of Jude the Obscure:
Lost Illusions: Part I, Two Poetsby Honore De Balzac, Kathleen Raine, Richard HowardISBN 0375757902 (0-375-75790-2)
Softcover, Modern Library
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost Illusions: Part I, Two Poets'More editions of Lost Illusions: Part I, Two Poets:
Lunar Parkby Bret Easton EllisISBN 0375727272 (0-375-72727-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lunar Park'More editions of Lunar Park:
-
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmareby G. K. ChestertonISBN 0375757910 (0-375-75791-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare'Book summary:In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."
But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.
Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried [via]More editions of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare:
-
Mansfield Parkby Jane Austen, Carol ShieldsISBN 0375757813 (0-375-75781-3)
Softcover, Modern Library
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mansfield Park'Book summary:Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In Mansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.
Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed, Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this is a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What does not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of Mansfield Park:
-
The Martian Chroniclesby Ray BradburyISBN 0380973839 (0-380-97383-9)
Hardcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Martian Chronicles'Book summary:Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun.
Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.
[via] -
The Meditations of Marcus Aureliusby George LongISBN 038072216X (0-380-72216-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius'Book summary:The insights and knowledge of this famed philosopher and Emperor are just as applicable to situations in today's world as they were in ancient Rome. When The Wall Street Journal asked Bill Clinton to name one book, other than the Bible, that's important to him, Clinton chose Aurelius' Meditations, which he rereads every couple of years. [via]
More editions of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:
-
Neither Here nor Thereby Bill BrysonISBN 0380713802 (0-380-71380-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Neither Here nor There'Book summary:Like many of his generation, Bill Bryson backpacked across Europe in the early seventies -- in search of enlightenment, beer, and women. Twenty years later he decided to retrace the journey he undertook in the halcyon days of his youth. The result is Neither Here Nor There, an affectionate and riotously funny pilgrimage from the frozen wastes of Scandinavia to the chaotic tumult of Istanbul, with stops along the way in Europe's most diverting and historic locales. Like many of his generation, Bill Bryson backpacked across Europe in the early seventies--in search of enlightenment, beer, and women. Twenty years later he decided to retrace the journey he undertook in the halcyon days of his youth. The result is Neither Here Nor There, an affectionate and riotously funny pilgrimage from the frozen wastes of Scandinavia to the chaotic tumult of Istanbul, with stops along the way in Europe's most diverting and historic locales.
[via]More editions of Neither Here nor There:
-
New Grub Streetby George Gissing, Francine ProseISBN 0375761101 (0-375-76110-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'New Grub Street'Book summary:Hailed as Gissings finest novel, New Grub Street portrays the intrigues and hardships of the publishing world in late Victorian England. In a materialistic, class-conscious society that rewards commercial savvy over artistic achievement, authors and scholars struggle to earn a living without compromising their standards. Even as the novel chills us with its still-recognizable portrayal of the crass and vulgar world of literary endeavor, writes Francine Prose in her Introduction, its very existence provides eloquent, encouraging proof of the fact that a powerful, honest writer can transcend the constraints of commerce.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1891 first edition. [via]More editions of New Grub Street:
-
Northanger Abbeyby Jane Austen, Robert KielyISBN 0375759174 (0-375-75917-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey'Book summary:Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.
Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of Northanger Abbey:
-
Oliver Twistby Charles Dickens, George CruikshankISBN 0375757848 (0-375-75784-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Oliver Twist'Book summary:Dickens's classic morality tale of a starving orphan caught between opposing forces of good and evil is a powerful indictment of Victorian England's Poor Laws. Filled with dark humor and an unforgettable cast of characters Oliver Twist, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sykes, and the Artful Dodger, to name a few Dickens's second novel is a compelling social satire that has remained popular since it was first serialized in 1837-39.
The text for this Modern Library Paperback Classic is taken from the 1846 New Edition, revised and corrected by the author. It includes new explanatory notes and an appendix, A Brief History of the English Poor Laws. [via]More editions of Oliver Twist:
Ota: The Pygmy in the Zooby Harvey Blume, Phillips Verner BradfordISBN 0385311052 (0-385-31105-2)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo'More editions of Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo:
-
Paris to the Moonby Adam GopnikISBN 0375758232 (0-375-75823-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris to the Moon'Book summary:In 1995 Gopnik was offered the plush assignment of writing the "Paris Journals" for the New Yorker. He spent five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries. A self-described "comic-sentimental essayist," Gopnik chose the romance of Paris in its particulars as his subject. Gopnik falls in unabashed love with what he calls Paris's commonplace civilization--the cafés, the little shops, the ancient carousel in the park, and the small, intricate experiences that happen in such settings. But Paris can also be a difficult city to love, particularly its pompous and abstract official culture with its parallel paper universe. The tension between these two sides of Paris and the country's general brooding over the decline of French dominance in the face of globalization (haute couture, cooking, and sex, as well as the economy, are running deficits) form the subtexts for these finely wrought and witty essays. With his emphasis on the micro in the macro, Gopnik describes trying to get a Thanksgiving turkey delivered during a general strike and his struggle to find an apartment during a government scandal over favoritism in housing allocations. The essays alternate between reports of national and local events and accounts of expatriate family life, with an emphasis on "the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." Gopnik describes some truly delicious moments, from the rites of Parisian haute couture, to the "occupation" of a local brasserie in protest of its purchase by a restaurant tycoon, to the birth of his daughter with the aid of a doctor in black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front. Gopnik makes terrific use of his status as an observer on the fringes of fashionable society to draw some deft comparisons between Paris and New York ("It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones") and do some incisive philosophizing on the nature of both. This is masterful reportage with a winning infusion of intelligence, intimacy, and charm. --Lesley Reed [via]
More editions of Paris to the Moon:
-
Persepolisby Marjane SatrapiISBN 037571457X (0-375-71457-X)
Softcover, Pantheon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Persepolis'Book summary:Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is an exemplary autobiographical graphic novel, in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's classic Maus. Set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, young Satrapi is the six-year-old daughter of two committed and well-to-do Marxists. As she grows up, she witness first-hand the effects that the revolution and the war with Iraq have on her home, family and school.
Like Maus, the main strength of Persepolis is its ability to make the political personal.
Told through the eyes of a child (as reflected in Satrapi's simplistic yet expressive black-and-white artwork), young Marjane learns about her family history and how it is entwined with the history of Iran, and watches her liberal parents cope with a fundamentalist regime that gets increasingly rigid as it gains more power. Outspoken and intelligent, Marjane chafes at Iran's increasingly conservative interpretation of Islamic law, especially as she grows into a bright and independent teenager. Throughout, Marjane remains a hugely likeable young woman
Persepolis gives the reader a snapshot of daily life in a country struggling with an internal cultural revolution and a bloody war, but within an intensely personal context. It's a very human history, beautifully and sympathetically told. --Robert Burrow [via]
More editions of Persepolis:
-
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Returnby Marjane SatrapiISBN 0375714669 (0-375-71466-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return'Book summary:Picking up the thread where her debut memoir-in-comics concluded, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return details Marjane Satrapi's experiences as a young Iranian woman cast abroad by political turmoil in her native country. Older, if not exactly wiser, Marjane reconciles her upbringing in war-shattered Tehran with new surroundings and friends in Austria. Whether living in the company of nuns or as the sole female in a house of eight gay men, she creates a niche for herself with friends and acquaintances who feel equally uneasy with their place in the world.
After a series of unfortunate choices and events leave her literally living in the street for three months, Marjane decides to return to her native Iran. Here, she is reunited with her family, whose liberalism and emphasis on Marjane's personal worth exert as strong an influence as the eye-popping wonders of Europe. Having grown accustomed to recreational drugs, partying, and dating, Marjane now dons a veil and adjusts to a society officially divided by gender and guided by fundamentalism. Emboldened by the example of her feisty grandmother, she tests the bounds of the morality enforced on the streets and in the classrooms. With a new appreciation for the political and spiritual struggles of her fellow Iranians, she comes to understand that "one person leaving her house while asking herself, 'is my veil in place?' no longer asks herself 'where is my freedom of speech?'"
Satrapi's starkly monochromatic drawing style and the keenly observed facial expressions of her characters provide the ideal graphic environment from which to appeal to our sympathies. Bereft of fine detail, this graphic novel guides the reader's attention instead toward a narrative rich with empathy. Don't be fooled by the glowering self-portrait of the author on the back flap; its nearly impossible to read Persepolis 2 without feeling warmth toward Marjane Satrapi. --Ryan Boudinot [via]
More editions of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return:
-
The Prince and the Pauperby Mark Twain, Christopher Paul CurtisISBN 0375761128 (0-375-76112-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Prince and the Pauper'Book summary:Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain's classic "tale for young people of all ages" features two identical-looking boys-a prince and a pauper-who trade clothes and step into each other's lives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power, Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiences the cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. As Christopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Prince and the Pauper is "funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet also chock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues against society's ills."This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the Mark Twain Project edition, which is the approved text of the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. [via]
More editions of The Prince and the Pauper:
Radio Free Albemuthby Philip K. DickISBN 0380702886 (0-380-70288-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Radio Free Albemuth'More editions of Radio Free Albemuth:
Representing Super Dollby Richard PeckISBN 038000416X (0-380-00416-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Representing Super Doll'More editions of Representing Super Doll:
-
The Second Shiftby Anne Machung, Anne HochschildISBN 0380711575 (0-380-71157-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second Shift'Book summary:In this landmark study, sociologist Arlie Hochschild takes us into the homes of two-career parents to observe what really goes on at the end of the "work day." Overwhelmingly, she discovers, it's the working mother who takes on the second shift. Hochschild finds that men share housework equally with their wives in only twenty percent of dual-career families. While many women accept this inequity in order to keep peace, they tend to suffer from chronic exhaustion, low sex drive, and more frequent illness as a result. The ultimate cost is the forfeited health and happiness of both partners, and often the survival of the marriage itself. [via]
More editions of The Second Shift:
-
Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bushby Molly Ivins, Lou DuboseISBN 0375757147 (0-375-75714-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush'Book summary:"Youthful political reporters are always told there are three ways to judge a politician," write Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in Shrub. "The first is to look at the record. The second is to look at the record. And third, look at the record." The record under scrutiny in this brief, informative book belongs to one George W. Bush--dubbed "Shrub" by Ivins--governor of Texas and 2000 presidential hopeful. These two veteran journalists know how politics are played in Texas and they've done their homework, writing a comprehensive examination of Bush's professional and political life that's a lively read, to boot. And if the title alone doesn't convey their particular slant, perhaps the following caveat from the introduction will: "If, at the end of this short book, you find W. Bush's political résumé a little light, don't blame us. There's really not much there. We have been looking for six years."
Beginning with his admission to the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War (where he bypassed a waiting list of about 100,000), the authors go on to deconstruct his losing congressional bid, his failed career as an oil executive, and his role as managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, revealing how he was helped every step of the way by wealthy and influential friends of the family. Ever popular, Dubya has always been good at rounding up powerful players to bankroll a variety of ventures, including political campaigns. For this reason, explain the authors, along with his lineage and social status, Bush's primary allegiance is to the business community. While his speeches may deal with the "entertainment issues" of "God, guns, and gays," Bush is a "wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America," they write. They further point out that Texas ranks near the bottom of the nation in terms of a number of social categories, such as poverty, health insurance for children, and pollution, spearing the governor for his less-than-compassionate conservatism.
Shrub is not a complete Bush whacking, though. The authors laud the governor's record on education, in which he has managed to raise standards, push local control of schools, and launch a successful reading campaign. They also cite his wooing of the Hispanic vote and his ability to bridge the gap between the Christian right and the economic conservatives within the Republican party as evidence of true political acumen, though they maintain he lacks a penchant for actual governing: "From the record, it appears that he doesn't know much, doesn't do much and doesn't care much about governing." Bush has admitted that he dislikes reading, particularly about policy issues, and that he hates meetings and briefings, causing the authors to wonder, "The puzzle of Bush is why someone with so little interest in or attention for policy, for making government work, would want the job of president, or even governor."
Love him or leave him, Shrub leaves much to consider about the man who would be president. And it can be read in about a day. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
More editions of Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush:
-
Sirens of Titanby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385333498 (0-385-33349-8)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sirens of Titan'Book summary:The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course theres a catch to the invitationand a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell. [via]
-
Slapstickby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385289359 (0-385-28935-9)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› 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 0385289448 (0-385-28944-8)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Slapstick or Lonesome No More!'More editions of Slapstick or Lonesome No More!:
The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White Houseby John F. HarrisISBN 0375760849 (0-375-76084-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House'More editions of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House:
-
A Tale of Two Citiesby Charles DickensISBN 0382099931 (0-382-09993-1)
Softcover, Silver Burdett Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Tale of Two Cities'Book summary:This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. [via]
-
Tales from Watership Downby Richard AdamsISBN 0380729342 (0-380-72934-2)
Softcover, Avon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales from Watership Down'Book summary:Mass market paperback. [via]
More editions of Tales from Watership Down:
-
Tess of the D'Urbervillesby Thomas Hardy, James WoodISBN 0375756795 (0-375-75679-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'Book summary:Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Etched against the background of a dying rural society, Tess of the d'Urbervilles was Thomas Hardy's "bestseller," and Tess Durbeyfield remains his most striking and tragic heroine. Of all the characters he created, she meant the most to him. Hopelessly torn between two men--Alec d'Urberville, a wealthy, dissolute young man who seduces her in a lonely wood, and Angel Clare, her provincial, moralistic, and unforgiving husband--Tess escapes from her vise of passion through a horrible, desperate act.
------"Like the greatest characters in literature, Tess lives beyond the final pages of the book as a permanent citizen of the imagination," said Irving Howe. "In Tess he stakes everything on his sensuous apprehension of a young woman's life, a girl who is at once a simple milkmaid and an archetype of feminine strength. . . . Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting."
------Now Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been brought to television in a magnificent new co-production from A&E Network and London Weekend Television. Justine Waddell (Anna Karenina) stars as the tragic heroine, Tess; Oliver Milburn (Chandler & Co.) is Angel Clare; and Jason Flemyng is Alec d'Urberville. [via]More editions of Tess of the D'Urbervilles:
Three Negro Classics: Up from Slavery, the Souls of Black Folk, the Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man.by Booker T. WashingtonISBN 0380015811 (0-380-01581-1)
Softcover, Avon Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Negro Classics: Up from Slavery, the Souls of Black Folk, the Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man.'More editions of Three Negro Classics: Up from Slavery, the Souls of Black Folk, the Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man.:
-
Time Machineby H. G. Wells, Ursula K. Le GuinISBN 0375761187 (0-375-76118-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Time Machine'Book summary:When the intrepid Time Traveller finds himself in the year 802,701, he encounters a seemingly utopian society of evolved human beings but then unearths the dark secret that sets mankind on course toward its inevitable destruction. An insightful look into a distant, bleak, and disturbing future, The Time Machine goes beyond the reaches of science fiction to provide a strikingly relevant discussion of social progress, class struggle, and the human condition.Hailed as a masterpiece of its genre, H. G. Wells's famous novella about the perils of history and the hubris of modernity comes vividly alive in this remarkable reissue of a unique 1931 illustrated edition. [via]
More editions of Time Machine:
-
Vagina Monologuesby Eve EnslerISBN 0375756981 (0-375-75698-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition'Book summary:"I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy. [via]
-
Vanity Fairby William Makepeace Thackery, Joanna TrollopeISBN 0375757260 (0-375-75726-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Vanity Fair'Book summary:"I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare [as D'Artagnan]. I do say there is none that I love so wholly."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
"The lasting and universal popularity of The Three Musketeers shows that Dumas, by artlessly expressing his own nature in the persons of his heroes, was responding to that craving for action, strength and generosity which is a fact in all periods and all places."
--Andreé Maurois
From the Hardcover edition. [via] 
Wampeters Foma and Granfalloonsby Kurt VonnegutISBN 0385294220 (0-385-29422-0)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons'More editions of Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons:
-
The War of the Worldsby H. G. Wells, Arthur C. ClarkeISBN 0375759239 (0-375-75923-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The War of the Worlds'Book summary:This is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories, first published by H.G. Wells in 1898. The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator tells readers that "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's..."
Things then progress from a series of seemingly mundane reports about odd atmospheric disturbances taking place on Mars to the arrival of Martians just outside of London. At first the Martians seem laughable, hardly able to move in Earth's comparatively heavy gravity even enough to raise themselves out of the pit created when their spaceship landed. But soon the Martians reveal their true nature as death machines 100-feet tall rise up from the pit and begin laying waste to the surrounding land. Wells quickly moves the story from the countryside to the evacuation of London itself and the loss of all hope as England's military suffers defeat after defeat. With horror his narrator describes how the Martians suck the blood from living humans for sustenance, and how it's clear that man is not being conquered so much a corralled. --Craig E. Engler [via]
More editions of The War of the Worlds:
-
Weby Yvegeny Zamyatin, Mirra GinsburgISBN 0380633132 (0-380-63313-2)
Softcover, Harpercollins
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'We'Book summary:Before Brave New World...
Before 1984...There was...WE
In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.
One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and that disease the ancients called the soul.
A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.
[via]More editions of We:
What Eric Knew: A Sebastian Barth Mysteryby James HoweISBN 0380713306 (0-380-71330-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'What Eric Knew: A Sebastian Barth Mystery'More editions of What Eric Knew: A Sebastian Barth Mystery:
Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justiceby Kathryn LyonISBN 0380790661 (0-380-79066-1)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice'More editions of Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice:
The Zap Gunby Philip K. DickISBN 0375719369 (0-375-71936-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Zap Gun'More editions of The Zap Gun:
Spanish
-
El profetaby Kahlil Gibran, Mauro ArminoISBN 0375701621 (0-375-70162-1)
Softcover, Random House Espanol
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'El profeta'Book summary:La obra maestra de Kahlil Gibrán es uno de los más queridos clásicos de nuestra época, un repositorio rico en sabiduría y alegría que ha inspirado a generaciones de lectores. Con poesía frugal y bellamente resonante, El profeta ofrece inolvidables palabras de esperanza y consolación sobre los temas del nacimiento, del amor, del matrimonio, de la muerte y de los otros hitos de la vida.
Desde su publicación hace más de setenta años, El profeta ha sido traducido a más de veinte idiomas y ha dado inspiración a millones de lectores, quienes encuentran en sus palabras la expresión de los más profundos impulsos, la más profunda poesía, del corazón humano. Ilustrados con los dibujos místicos de Gibrán--comparados por Auguste Rodin a los de William Blake--El profeta es un volumen para disfrutar y al cual volver a lo largo de la vida. [via]More editions of El profeta:
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}