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› Find signed collectible books: '1066 And All That'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America'
Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes, author of the highly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New has made his home in the United States for the last 20 years. His latest undertaking, which he calls "a love letter to America," is his most massive: a 350-year history of art in America. Published in association with an eight-part PBS series of the same name, this is no scholarly text. With the same voracious wit and opinionated brilliance that have characterized his criticism for Time magazine, this tour-de-force spans three centuries of events, movements, and personalities that have shaped American society and its art. The reproductions are outstanding; 323 out of 365 are in rich, vivid color. Infinitely entertaining and perceptive, this superb book makes readers feel as if they have discovered a truer, hidden America. It seems certain to become one of the most important works in the art-historical canon. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angela's Hunt'
Featuring Todd McFalane's popular character, Spawn, this book ties directly into it's popular storyline. Four-color artwork. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood From A Stone'
Guido Brunetti, the protagonist of Donna Leon's brilliant series about crime in high and low places in Venice, Italy, is back in a smart thriller about a murdered street vendor, one of the illegal immigrants who sell fake fashion accessories outside the tourist mecca's high-priced boutiques while trying to stay one step ahead of the law. Someone had a reason for wanting the nameless African man dead, and the search for the killers and the men who sent them to Brunetti's beloved and beautifully evoked city shortly before Christmas leads the thoughtful, multifaceted and uxorious Commissario to the unfamiliar Venetian milieu where the vu cumpra live. In the cramped, airless room where the Senegalese vendors manage to find shelter, Guido discovers a fortune in so-called "conflict diamonds" hidden among the murdered man's meager belongings. But finding the diamonds' provenance and the killers who were seeking them proves to be an exercise in bureaucratic misdirection. Warned off the case by his boss in the name of "national security," Guido nonetheless persists with his investigation, in the course of which he discovers what--and who--really matters to him. Leon depicts the city she also clearly loves with such skill the reader can almost hear the watter lapping at the edges of the canals and smell the espresso beans roasting in the crisp cold winter air. A tour de force from an author whose reputation for skillful plotting, extraordinary descriptive powers, and complex characters has earned her a loyal base of fans; if you haven't discovered her work before this, Blood from a Stone will only whet your appetite for her extensive backlist of titles featuring Brunetti and his colleagues. --Jane Adams [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Thoth'
Based on medieval symbolism and ancient Kabbalistic tradition. Min: 1. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians Being the Equinx Volume III No. V'
Based on medieval symbolism and ancient Kabbalistic tradition. Min: 1. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Burning Patience'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cold Mountain'
Winner of the 1997 National Book Award
A New York Times and Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
Charles Frazier has created a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendour and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cosmos'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dance Hall of the Dead'
Two young boys suddenly disappear. One of them, a Zuñi, leaves a pool of blood behind. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, of the Navajo Tribal Police, tracks the brutal killer. Three things complicate the search: an archaeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuñi. Compelling, terrifying, and highly suspenseful, Dance Hall of the Dead never relents -- from first page till last.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Darkness More Than Night'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing with Plants'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don't Panic'
"It's all devastatingly true - except the bits that are lies. - Douglas Adams
Don't Panic celebrates the life of an ape-descended human called Douglas Adams who, in a field in Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea.
This is also the story of what that idea became: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the original radio series which started it all, and the five book trilogy', the TV series, almost-film, computer game, towel and website that followed. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman also tells the whole story of Liff, the Universe of Dirk Gently, and everything else Douglas ever worked on. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'El Cartero De Neruda'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Senor De Los Anillos'
Minotauro 2002 edition. Printed in Spain. Book is in Spanish. Cover is same than the one shown in the listing. Very nice copy, pages clean and crisp. Paperback. Like new condition. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Explorer's Garden: Rare and Unusual Perennials'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fluke'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frequent Hearses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frequent Hearses; A Detective Story'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glimpses of the Moon'
Professor Gervase Fen is in Devon working on his masterpiece critique of the modern novel, but keeps getting distracted - by the local animals (several pigs, a mildly insane cat, a horse with sleeping sickness), by the spectacular failures of the local electrical board, by the vicar's practical jokes, by the retired major yearning for another jolly war. Oh, and by the dismembered body, found in a nearby field, whose head keeps turning up in the most unlikely places.
[via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harpo Speaks'
To Marx Brothers fans who have yet to read this book: Put it off as long as you can, because once you are finished, you will wish you could read it again for the first time. Harpo's life was interesting in itself, but it also frequently intersected with the lives of other fascinating people, most notably his own brothers and drama critic Alexander Woolcott. Marx also was part of the legendary Algonquin Round Table; he's got plenty to say about that. Wait'll you hear about what it means to "throw a Gookie." You'll never be able to watch a Marx Brothers movie again without looking for the Gookie! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harry Potter a L'ecole Des Sorciers / Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Company of Cheerful Ladies'
THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 6
Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the basis of the HBO TV show, and its proprietor Precious Ramotswe, Botswanas premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, and good humornot to mention help from her loyal assistant, Grace Makutsi, and the occasional cup of tea.
Precious is busier than usual at the detective agency when she discovers an intruder in her house on Zebra Driveand perhaps even more baffling--a pumpkin on her porch. Her associate, Mma Makutsi, also has a full plate. She's taken up dance lessons, only to be partnered with a man with two left feet. And at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is already overburdened with work, one of his apprentices has run off with a wealthy older woman. But what finally rattles Mma Ramotswes normally unshakable composure is a visitor who forces her to confront a difficult secret from her past. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Instance of the Fingerpost'
An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies, and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and, for once, the comparison is apt.
The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon-like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost." (The quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.")
Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Kite Runner'
The New York Times bestseller and international classic loved by millions of readers. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Kite Runner: Bookclub-in-a-box Presents the Discussion Companion for Khaled Hosseini's Novel'
The "kite runner" of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.
Narrated by Amir as a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.
The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park. --Lisa Alward [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller And Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The March'
As the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death, destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In The March, E.L. Doctorow has put his unique stamp on these events by staying close to historical fact, naming real people and places and then imagining the rest, as he did in Ragtime.
Recently, the Civil War has been the subject of novels by Howard Bahr, Michael Shaara, Charles Frazier, and Robert Hicks, to name a few. Its perennial appeal is due not only to the fact that it was fought on our own soil, but also that it captures perfectly our long-time and ongoing ambivalence about race. Doctorow examines this question extensively, chronicling the dislocation of both southern whites and Negroes as Sherman burned and destroyed all that they had ever known. Sherman is a well-drawn character, pictured as a crazy tactical genius pitted against his West Point counterparts. Doctorow creates a context for the march: "The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize... There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?"
The characters depicted on the march are those people high and low, white and black, whose lives are forever changed by war: Pearl, the newly free daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, Colonel Sartorius, a competent, remote, almost robotic surgeon; several officers, both Union and Confederate; two soldiers, Arly and Will, who provide comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare's fools until, suddenly, their roles are not funny anymore.
Doctorow has captured the madness of war in his description of the condition of a dispossessed Southern white woman: "What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson's mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable." And later, " This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle."
As we have come to expect, Doctorow puts the reader in the picture; never more so than in recalling "The March" and letting us see it as a cautionary tale for our times. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Memoirs of a Professional CAD'
The lingering image of George Sanders, kept alive by his appearances in dozens of famous films, is that of the cultured cad. Sanders won an Oscar for his performance as the acerbic, haughty drama critic in "All About Eve" and gave good accounts of himself as a cad in "Rebecca" and "The Moon and Sixpence", but mostly he ambled through more than a hundred films with a strangely appealing insouciance that fascinated even those with whom he worked. Perhaps it was the way he spoke--like a well-tuned cello voicing aphorisms. He was a witty man, and his autobiography, "The Memoirs of a Professional Cad", published in 1960, is one of the most amusing and literate books ever written by an actor. Veteran broadcaster and film historian Tony Thomas has filled in the rest of the George Sanders story by supplying an introduction, a lengthy epilogue, and a filmography of Sanders's 110 films. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr. Punch'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murder Mysteries'
One of the most celebrated writers in the history of comics teams up once again with one of the industry's most accomplished artists! For the first time in nine years, since the award-winning 50th issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell once again venture into the world of myth and angels. Constructing and maintaining all of heaven and earth is an immense task, which God has divided up amongst the various ranks and stations of angels. As with any such huge effort, there are bound to be casualties. This unique passion play sheds light on the hands behind creation, as well as one lonely man in Los Angeles who gets to hear the whole story of a most unspeakable crime: a murder in paradise! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's Stardust'
De Féerie, le pays magique, les habitants du petit village de Wall savent peu de choses. Il faut dire qu'un grand mur les en séparent. Un mur dans lequel est ouvert une brèche, une brèche bien gardée, par laquelle ils n'ont droit de passer qu'une fois l'an, le jour de la grande foire de Wall. C'est ce jour-là, justement, que le jeune Tristram Thorn, décidé à conquérir le cSur de sa belle, part pour le pays de fée afin de lui ramener une étoile filante. Mais dans un pays magique, rien n'est comme ailleurs. Les distances sont immenses, on y croise nains et licornes, des chasseurs d'éclairs naviguent sur des bateaux volants et l'on est jamais à l'abri d'un mauvais sort qui pourra vous transformer en arbre, en chèvre ou en rat. Un monde plein de dangers et de merveilles que Tristram est loin d'imaginer, comme il est loin d'imaginer que son étoile filante est une belle et pure jeune fille, dont la présence ici-bas va éveiller la concupiscence des sept seigneurs de Sromhold comme de quelques vilaines sorcières...
Neil Gaiman est aussi à l'aise dans la BD (Sandman), que dans le roman (Neverwhere). Un talent inépuisable qu'il confirme une fois de plus ici en revisitant avec bonheur l'univers des contes de fées. À la fois drôle, merveilleux et volontairement naïf, Stardust est une réussite. --Georges Louhans [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Neither Here nor There'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'
Penzler Pick, July 2001: Working in a mystery tradition that will cause genre aficionados to think of such classic sleuths as Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner or Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee, Alexander McCall Smith creates an African detective, Precious Ramotswe, who's their full-fledged heir.
It's the detective as folk hero, solving crimes through an innate, self-possessed wisdom that, combined with an understanding of human nature, invariably penetrates into the heart of a puzzle. If Miss Marple were fat and jolly and lived in Botswana--and decided to go against any conventional notion of what an unmarried woman should do, spending the money she got from selling her late father's cattle to set up a Ladies' Detective Agency--then you have an idea of how Precious sets herself up as her country's first female detective. Once the clients start showing up on her doorstep, Precious enjoys a pleasingly successful series of cases.
But the edge of the Kalahari is not St. Mary Mead, and the sign Precious orders, painted in brilliant colors, is anything but discreet. Pointing in the direction of the small building she had purchased to house her new business, it reads "THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY. FOR ALL CONFIDENTIAL MATTERS AND ENQUIRIES. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED FOR ALL PARTIES. UNDER PERSONAL MANAGEMENT."
The solutions she comes up with, whether in the case of the clinic doctor with two quite different personalities (depending on the day of the week), or the man who had joined a Christian sect and seemingly vanished, or the kidnapped boy whose bones may or may not be those in a witch doctor's magic kit, are all sensible, logical, and satisfying. Smith's gently ironic tone is full of good humor towards his lively, intelligent heroine and towards her fellow Africans, who live their lives with dignity and with cautious acceptance of the confusions to which the world submits them. Precious Ramotswe is a remarkable creation, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency well deserves the praise it received from London's Times Literary Supplement. I look forward with great eagerness to the upcoming books featuring the memorable Miss Ramotswe, Tears of the Giraffe and Morality for Beautiful Girls, soon to be available in the U.S. --Otto Penzler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Northwest Garden Style: Ideas, Designs, and Methods for the Creative Gardener'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Beauty'
In an author's note at the end of On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes: "My largest structural debt should be obvious to any E.M. Forster fan; suffice it to say he gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with new material as best I could." If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Forster, perched on a cloud somewhere, should be all puffed up with pride. His disciple has taken Howards End, that marvelous tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender. The end result is a story for the 21st century, told with a perfect ear for everything: gangsta street talk; academic posturing, both British and American; down-home black Floridian straight talk; and sassy, profane kids, both black and white.
Howard Belsey is a middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington, a thinly disguised version of one of the Ivies. He is a Rembrandt scholar who can't finish his book and a recent adulterer whose marriage is now on the slippery slope to disaster. His wife, Kiki, a black Floridian, is a warm, generous, competent wife, mother, and medical worker. Their children are Jerome, disgusted by his father's behavior, Zora, Wellington sophomore firebrand feminist and Levi, eager to be taken for a "homey," complete with baggy pants, hoodies and the ever-present iPod. This family has no secrets--at least not for long. They talk about everything, appropriate to the occasion or not. And, there is plenty to talk about.
The other half of the story is that of the Kipps family: Monty, stiff, wealthy ultra-conservative vocal Christian and Rembrandt scholar, whose book has been published. His wife Carlene is always slightly out of focus, and that's the way she wants it. She wafts over all proceedings, never really connecting with anyone. That seems to be endemic in the Kipps household. Son Michael is a bit of a Monty clone and daughter Victoria is not at all what Daddy thinks she is. Indeed, Forster's advice, "Only connect," is lost on this group.
The two academics have long been rivals, detesting each other's politics and disagreeing about Rembrandt. They are thrown into further conflict when Jerome leaves Wellington to get away from the discovery of his father's affair, lands on the Kipps' doorstep, falls for Victoria and mistakes what he has going with her for love. Howard makes it worse by trying to fix it. Then, Kipps is granted a visiting professorship at Wellington and the whole family arrives in Massachusetts.
From this raw material, Smith has fashioned a superb book, her best to date. She has interwoven class, race, and gender and taken everyone prisoner. Her even-handed renditions of liberal and/or conservative mouthings are insightful, often hilarious, and damning to all. She has a great time exposing everyone's clay feet. This author is a young woman cynical beyond her years, and we are all richer for it. --Valerie Ryan [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrewnce'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Postman'
"A jewel of a story." The New Yorker The unforgettable inspiration for the Academy Awardwinning Il Postino, this classic novel established Antonio Skßrmeta's reputation as one of the most representative authors of the post-boom generation in contemporary Latin American letters (Christian Science Monitor). Boisterously funny and passionate, The Postman tells of young love ignited by the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Set in the colorful, ebullient years preceding the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the book has been translated into nearly twenty-five languages around the world. . [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Remains of the Day'
An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950s. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Return of the King'
Part three of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic adventure The Lord of the Rings, now featuring film art on the cover.
"An extraordinary work -- pure excitement." -- New York Times Book Review
"A triumphant close...a grand piece of work, grand in both conception and execution. An astonishing imaginative tour de force." -- Daily Telegraph
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
As the Shadow of Mordor grows across the land, the Companions of the Ring have become involved in separate adventures. Aragorn, revealed as the hidden heir of the ancient Kings of the West, has joined with the Riders of Rohan against the forces of Isengard, and took part in the desperate victory of the Hornburg. Merry and Pippin, captured by Orcs, escaped into Fangorn Forest and there encountered the Ents.
Gandalf has miraculously returned and defeated the evil wizard, Saruman. Sam has left his master for dead after a battle with the giant spider, Shelob; but Frodo is still alive -- now in the foul hands of the Orcs.
And all the while the armies of the Dark Lord are massing as the One Ring draws ever nearer to the Cracks of Doom. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rumpole And The Penge Bungalow Murders'
John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders sees our eponymous hero tackle his first ever case. It is just after the war and two RAF heroes are found shot dead. Simon Jerold, the son of one of the victims, is the only suspect and young Rumpole is given the hopeless task of defending him. But Rumpole is determined to save his client from the gallows and make a name for himself. His bid to do so opens the first chapter in the story of the law's finest comic creation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shape of Snakes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shoggoth's Old Peculiar'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stardust'
The versatile Neil Gaiman is best known for scripting upmarket graphic novels, most famously the lengthy Sandman cycle. Stardust was a joint project with artist Charles Vess, a short novel of fairyland enriched by at least one sumptuous painting on every page. This edition contains only the (slightly rewritten) text, alas. Gaiman's story looks back to days before commercial genre fantasy, to Lord Dunsany's and Hope Mirrlees's visions of Faerie as a misty country which is at the same time temptingly close and "over the hills and far away". The simple tale is new but has a twice-told familiarity, crafted like a mosaic from many traditional elements. Hopelessly crossed in love, a boy of half-fairy parentage leaves his mundane Victorian-English village on a quest for a fallen star in the magical realm. The star proves to be an attractive woman with a hot temper, who plunges with our hero into adventures featuring witches, the lion and the unicorn, plotting elf-lords, ships that sail the sky, magical transformations, curses whose effects rebound, binding conditions with hidden loopholes and all the rest. Stardust is by turns knowing, poetic, comic and grisly and exudes considerable charm. If only we had those full-colour Vess paintings too. --David Langford [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stars'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tam Lin'
A modern retelling of an ancient Scottish fairy tale sets the story of a girl whose lover is stolen by the Queen of Faeries against the backdrop of a midwestern college campus in the late sixties. Reprint. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Unsuitable Job for a Woman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Until I Find You'
At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.
Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.
Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.
Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Walk in the Park: Poems'
A Walk in the Park is the debut book of poetry by Russell L. Drake. His poetry cuts across cultural lines with an Afrocentric flavor. The book is divided into three sections. The first section is rhyme and verse, followed by haiku and then a short story. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Teeth: Reader's Companion'
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.
Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions:
The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El cartero de Neruda'
Mario Jimenez, joven pescador, decide abandonar su oficio para convertirse en cartero de isla Negra, donde la unica persona que recibe y envia correspondencia es el poeta Pablo Neruda. A traves de esta trama tan original como seductora, el autor logra un intenso retrato de la convulsa decada de los setenta en Chile, asi como una cautivadora historia de amor y una poetica recreacion de la vida de Pablo Neruda. Esta novela, traducida a veinticinco idiomas, es ya un clasico de las letras universales, y la pelicula basada en ella fue nominada a cinco Oscar. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cometas En El Cielo / The Kite Runner'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Curioso Incidente Del Perro A Medianoche'
2005 SALAMANDRA Spanish Edition SOFTCOVER [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Primera Detective De Botsuana'
En Botswana nunca había habido una mujer detective... hasta el día en que Mma Ramotswe decide abrir su pequeña oficina al pie del monte Kgale, cerca del desierto de Kalahari. Le basta con unas sillas, dos mesas, un teléfono y una secretaria... además de unas tazas para invitar a los clientes a tomar un té. ¿Qué otra cosa se requiere para resolver misterios? Al fin y al cabo, ¿no se han dedicado siempre las mujeres a escuchar y a intentar solucionar los problemas de los demás frente a una taza de té?
Mma Ramotswe no es una irónica intelectual ni una aguerrida ex policía, sino una mujer alegre y rolliza, cargada de sentido común y con un firme deseo de ayudar al prójimo. En su opinión, muchas personas no saben distinguir el bien del mal, y hay que enseñarles la diferencia. Huérfana, superviviente de un matrimonio infernal y madre por sólo cinco días, esta Miss Marple africana sabe reconocer el dolor ajeno, y quiere contribuir a aliviarlo. Sus métodos son tal vez poco ortodoxos, pero también lo son sus casos, así como sus atribulados clientes.
Con sus acertadas descripciones y sus sensatos comentarios, la protagonista de esta novela nos introduce paso a paso en la realidad de un país lejano y desconocido, donde la teconología convive con las tradiciones mágicas, y donde resulta más fácil conocer las noticias de boca de las vecinas que leyendo la prensa. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stardust'
De Féerie, le pays magique, les habitants du petit village de Wall savent peu de choses. Il faut dire qu'un grand mur les en séparent. Un mur dans lequel est ouvert une brèche, une brèche bien gardée, par laquelle ils n'ont droit de passer qu'une fois l'an, le jour de la grande foire de Wall. C'est ce jour-là, justement, que le jeune Tristram Thorn, décidé à conquérir le cSur de sa belle, part pour le pays de fée afin de lui ramener une étoile filante. Mais dans un pays magique, rien n'est comme ailleurs. Les distances sont immenses, on y croise nains et licornes, des chasseurs d'éclairs naviguent sur des bateaux volants et l'on est jamais à l'abri d'un mauvais sort qui pourra vous transformer en arbre, en chèvre ou en rat. Un monde plein de dangers et de merveilles que Tristram est loin d'imaginer, comme il est loin d'imaginer que son étoile filante est une belle et pure jeune fille, dont la présence ici-bas va éveiller la concupiscence des sept seigneurs de Sromhold comme de quelques vilaines sorcières...
Neil Gaiman est aussi à l'aise dans la BD (Sandman), que dans le roman (Neverwhere). Un talent inépuisable qu'il confirme une fois de plus ici en revisitant avec bonheur l'univers des contes de fées. À la fois drôle, merveilleux et volontairement naïf, Stardust est une réussite. --Georges Louhans [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Una Breve Historia De Casi Todo/a Short History of Nearly Everything'
One of the worlds best-selling writers takes his ultimate journey into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. Its a dazzling quest, to understand what that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, &how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since. Description in Spanish: Bill Bryson se describe como un viajero renuente, pero ni siquiera cuando está en su casa, en la seguridad de su estudio, puede contener esa curiosidad que siente por el mundo que le rodea. En Una breve historia de casi todo intenta entender qué ocurrió entre la Gran Explosión y el surgimiento de la civilización, cómo pasamos de la nada a lo ahora somos. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vida De Pi / Life of Pi'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dunkler als die Nacht.'
Als einer der vorzüglichsten amerikanischen Krimiautoren ist der ehemalige Polizeireporter Michael Connelly natürlich zum virtuosen Umgang mit seinem Stoff in der Lage. Darüber hinaus aber vermag er seiner Handlung eine ungewöhnliche Sogwirkung zu verleihen, die den Leser aus der Rolle des distanzierten Betrachters zur unmittelbaren Anteilnahme zwingt. Connelly gelingt ein nervenaufreibender Spannungsaufbau durch die Verknüpfung scheinbar zusammenhangloser Handlungsstränge, die Konfrontation zweier starker Heldenfiguren und die Verbindung eines monströsen Verbrechens mit dem Hauptwerk des niederländischen Renaissancemalers Hieronymus Bosch.
Harry Bosch ist erfolgreicher Ermittler des Los Angeles Police Department und steht als ermittelnder Beamter im Aufsehen erregenden Mordprozess gegen den Filmregisseur David Storey auf der Seite der Anklage. Storey soll eine Mitarbeiterin in seinem Haus erdrosselt und die Tote dann in ihre Wohnung zurückgebracht haben. Der Angeklagte legt eine Arroganz und Selbstsicherheit an den Tag, die Bosch aufbringt. Sein einziges Ziel kann nur Storeys Verurteilung sein.
Terry McCaleb arbeitete als so genannter Profiler im Dienste des FBI. Seine Aufgabe war es, aufgrund von Tatumständen und Tatorten Täterprofile zu entwerfen, die den Fahndern die Aufklärung von Gewaltverbrechen erleichtern können. Nach einer Herztransplantation musste McCaleb seine überaus erfolgreiche Tätigkeit beenden. Als er in einem verfahrenen Mordfall inoffiziell um Hilfe gebeten wird, wird ihm klar, dass er sich nie wirklich der Faszination des alten Jobs entziehen konnte. Wie ein "trockener" Alkoholiker nach dem ersten neuerlichen Schluck verfällt McCaleb seiner Arbeit wieder mit Haut und Haaren. Zu seiner Überraschung erkennt er nach den ersten Nachforschungen, dass das Verbrechen nach einem Gemälde von Hieronymus Bosch inszeniert zu sein scheint. Und zu seinem Entsetzen entwirft er ein Täterprofil, das nicht nur des Namens wegen auf einen alten Bekannten zu deuten scheint: auf Harry Bosch.
Dunkler als die Nacht ist sicher einer der besten Polizeiromane der letzten Jahre, der sich besonders durch die feine psychologische Ausgestaltung seiner Hauptfiguren und eine buchstäblich haarsträubend spannende Handlung auf höchstem Niveau auszeichnet. Am besten natürlich nachts zu lesen! --Ulrich Deurer [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zähne zeigen'
Zähne zeigen, monumental im Ausmaß und intim im Ansatz, ist ein ehrgeiziger Roman. Seine Themen drehen sich um Herkunft, Religion, Geschlechterbeziehungen, Hautfarbe, gesellschaftliche Stellung und Geschichte, aber Zadie Smith ist mit einem Witz und einem Einfallsreichtum gesegnet, die diese gewichtigen Ideen mühelos leicht erscheinen lassen.
Die Handlung führt uns nach Jamaika, die Türkei, Bangladesch und Indien und bringt uns schließlich in einen schäbigen Vorort von North London, in dem die zwei merkwürdigen Helden dieses Buches zu Hause sind: Archie Jones, der es mit der Wahrheit nicht so genau nimmt, und Samad Iqbal, der im hohen Maße dem Alkohol zuspricht. Sie begegneten sich erstmals im Zweiten Weltkrieg als Mitglieder eines vom Pech verfolgten Bataillons und sind seitdem unzertrennlich. Archie heiratet die schöne Clara mit den vorstehenden Zähnen, die sich auf der Flucht vor ihrer Mutter befindet, einer Zeugin Jehovas, und mit der er eine Tochter hat, Irie. Samad heiratet die pampige Alsana, die ihm zwei stramme Jungs schenkt -- Zwillinge: "Kinder mit Vor- und Zunamen, die sich auf direktem Kollisionskurs befinden; Namen, hinter denen sich Massenexodus, überfüllte Boote und Flugzeuge, unfreundliche Ankünfte und ärztliche Untersuchungen verbergen."
Große Fragen verlangen nach kühn gezeichneten Charakteren. Zadie Smiths Helden sind nicht heroisch; sie sind einfach echt: warmherzig, komisch, fehlgeleitet und absolut vertraut. Wenn man ihre Unterhaltungen liest, kommt man sich vor, als würde man sie heimlich belauschen. In einer ganz einfachen Szene unterhalten sich Alsana und Clara im Park über ihre Schwangerschaften: "Eine Frau muss ihre privaten Dinge haben -- ein Ehemann sollte sich nicht in die körperlichen Angelegenheiten einmischen, in den Intimbereich einer Frau."
Samad ist verärgert über seine Söhne: "Sie sind beide vom Weg abgekommen; so weit weg von dem, was ich für sie geplant hatte. Es gibt wohl keinen Zweifel, dass sie beide irgendwann weiße Frauen heiraten werden, die Sheila heißen, und mich früh unter die Erde bringen." Hier spiegeln sich "die Ängste des Einwanderers -- Identitätsverlust, Auflösung" -- deutlich wider, die Samad mehr als alles andere geprägt haben.
Die Lektüre von Zähne zeigen ist eine wahre Freude. In diesem Buch wimmelt es vor Leben und Überschwänglichkeit, und doch besitzt es genug Schläue und despektierliche Seriosität, um ihm eine gewisse Bissigkeit zu geben. --Eithne Farry [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Denti Bianchi / White Teeth'
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