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› Find signed collectible books: 'About the New Yorker and Me: A Sentimental Journal'
Celebrated "New Yorker" writer, E.J. Kahn, Jr. wrote a witty, literate, and marvelously entertaining memoir in 1979. A veteran writer, Kahn, Jr. has seen it all at "The New Yorker", one of NYC's major magazines. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made'
"The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."
This now-famous line first appeared in the prospectus Harold Ross wrote for a humor magazine he was hoping to start, and, in fact, epitomized the publication's early years. For, as contributing editor E.B. White once ruefully wrote in response to a query about what kind of submissions were wanted, "I myself have only the vaguest idea what sort of manuscripts The New Yorker wants. I have, however, a pretty clear idea of what it doesn't want."
Plenty of books have been written about The New Yorker over the years--many by people who were intimately connected with it. Ben Yagoda's About Town is the first, however, to concentrate on the magazine itself, rather than the personalities who shaped it. In his introduction Yagoda writes: "What I had in mind was a critical and cultural history. It would consider, first, the content of the magazine--how its original form came to be, and how and why it evolved over the years. Second, I would look at the role the New Yorker has played in American cultural life." Yagoda is as good as his word as he takes readers from the founding of the magazine in 1919 up until 1987, the year William Shawn was forcibly retired from his position as editor in chief. An epilogue covers the Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick years, but the author considers that with Shawn's departure, the curtain came down on The New Yorker as "a unique and influential institution in our culture."
Of course devotees of Harold Ross's brainchild could be expected to eat this book up, but About Town is more than just the story of how a magazine was made. Yagoda provides a window on a lost age--New York in the '20s, '30s, and '40s before the advent of television, when magazines and newspapers were at the center of the nation's cultural and intellectual life. He writes well, evoking the times, the people, and the places with such clarity that Harold Ross himself would have been pleased. And it is to Ross that Yagoda and the reader owe much of About Town, for it seems The New Yorker's founding editor kept meticulous records--as did those with whom he worked. When S.I. Newhouse took control of the magazine in 1985, its editorial files--all 2,500 archival boxes of them--ended up at the New York Public Library. Letters from editors to writers and vice versa, minutes from art meetings, memos, editorial queries, and marked-up manuscripts are the raw materials from which Yagoda shapes his story, and he tells it so well that it often reads like a novel. The section dealing with the magazine's decision to run John Hersey's Hiroshima in its entirety is positively gripping.
But perhaps the best thing about About Town--for those readers who, like Alice in Wonderland, demand pictures and conversations in their stories--is the plethora of memorable quotes (and even a few photographs) that bring to life The New Yorker in its heyday. Consider this letter from Vladimir Nabokov concerning a short story the magazine had bought:
A man called Ross started to "edit" it, and I wrote to Mrs. White telling her that I could not accept any of those ridiculous and exasperating alterations (odds and ends inserted in order to "link up" ideas and make them clear to the "average reader"). Nothing like it has ever happened to me in my life.Or this snippet from Ross's letter to H.L. Mencken: "We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don't know how to get it under control."
Lovers of The New Yorker can thank their stars that Harold Ross never did get his fussiness under control. And they can thank Ben Yagoda for writing this comprehensive and satisfying biography of one of America's most enduring literary institutions. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All Aboard With E.M. Frimbo: World's Greatest Railroad Buff'
Rogers E. M. Whitaker was a longtime reporter for the New Yorker, specializing in "Talk of the Town" pieces. He was also an expert on railroads, and spent most of his non-working time riding trains. Eventually he began contributing pieces about his rail journeys to the magazine, under the pseudonym "E. M. Frimbo." For decades his diligent reporting and sparkling prose glorified trains and destinations. In this collection, assembled by Whitaker's New Yorker colleague Tony Hiss, the reader is taken on rail trips throughout the United States as well as on excursions through Switzerland, Wales, and Siberia. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Annals of the Former World'
In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.
McPhee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is his ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example, the processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so by allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot they are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of the New Yorker, 1925-1995'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq'
As the death toll mounts in the Iraq War, Americans are agonizing over how the mess started and what to do now. George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, joins the debate with his thoughtful book The Assassins' Gate. Packer describes himself as an ambivalent pro-war liberal "who supported a war [in Iraq] by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore." He never believed the argument that Iraq should be invaded because of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he saw the war as a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein and build democracy in Iraq, in the vein of the U.S. interventions in Haiti and Bosnia.
How did such lofty aims get so derailed? How did the U.S. get stuck in a quagmire in the Middle East? Packer traces the roots of the war back to a historic shift in U.S. policy that President Bush made immediately after 9/11. No longer would the U.S. be hamstrung by multilateralism or working through the UN. It would act unilaterally around the world--forging temporary coalitions with other nations where suitable--and defend its status as the sole superpower. But when it came to Iraq, even Bush administration officials were deeply divided. Packer takes readers inside the vicious bureaucratic warfare between the Pentagon and State Department that turned U.S. policy on Iraq into an incoherent mess. We see the consequences in the second half of The Assassins' Gate, which takes the reader to Iraq after the bombs have stopped dropping. Packer writes vividly about how the country deteriorated into chaos, with U.S. authorities in Iraq operating in crisis mode. The book fails to capture much of the debate about the war among Iraqis themselves--instead relying mostly on the views of one prominent Iraqi exile--but it is an insightful contribution to the debate about the decisions--and blunders--behind the war. --Alex Roslin [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Book of Ogden Nash'
Here, in one volume, are the most popular poems of one of the most popular poets of the twentieth century -- perhaps of the last twenty centuries. Delightfully nonsensical, they in fact make the best of sense, accomplishing what only real poetry can -- allowing the reader to discover what he didn't know he already knew or felt. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People'
Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Orchid Thief, has always been drawn to the extraordinary in the ordinary, so when her Esquire editor asked her to profile the child actor Macaulay Culkin using the title "The American Man at Age Ten," she insisted instead on writing about a "typical" kid. The result--one of the 20 profiles drawn from magazines such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone for this collection--is a vivid window into the life of an ordinary and endearing boy from New Jersey who grapples with girls, environmental destruction, and the magical childhood landscape "that erodes from memory a little bit every day." Orlean has two tricks up her sleeve that make her profiles irresistible. First, she's got a mean hook. Take this lead: "Of all the guys who are standing around bus shelters in Manhattan dressed in nothing but their underpants, Marky Mark is undeniably the most polite." Second, she has an uncanny way of drawing her subjects. Bill Blass "is a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp," while a boxer (the dog kind) wears "the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor."
Orlean is a New Yorker herself, and most of her subjects hail from the Big Apple, including such unique personas as a real estate broker who can describe the inside of almost any apartment in the city ("Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience"); Nat, the new tailor at Manhattan Valet; her hairdresser; the city's most popular clown; an Ashanti king who drives a taxi; and the owner of the only buttons-only store in America. The author is keenly observant and always tries to walk in her subject's shoes, even when it's a show dog ("If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale"). When she does tackle the rich and famous, she uses these same talents to create portraits so intimate and zesty they're unlike any other. Orlean writes that her only justification for choosing a story is that she cares about it, and it shows. Her fondness for her subjects rubs off as she draws us into the tight and exquisite focus of their mundane and fascinating lives. --Lesley Reed [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Christmas at The New Yorker'
From the pages of Americas most influential magazine come eight decades of holiday cheerplus the occasional comical coal in the stockingin one incomparable collection. Sublime and ridiculous, sentimental and searing, Christmas at The New Yorker is a gift of great writing and drawing by literary legends and laugh-out-loud cartoonists.
Here are seasonal stories, poems, memoirs. and more, from a stellar roster of writers, including John Cheever, James Dickey, Richard Ford, Ken Kesey, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, S. J. Perelman, Adrienne Rich, and James Thurber. And it wouldnt be Christmasor The New Yorkerwithout dozens of covers and cartoons by Addams, Arno, Chast, and others, or the mischievous verse of Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, and Ogden Nash (Do you know Mrs. Millard Fillmore Revere? / On her calendar, Christmas comes three hundred and sixty-five times a year.)
From Jazz Age to New Age, E. B. White to Garrison Keillor, these works represent eighty years of wonderful keepsakes for Christmas, from The New Yorker to you. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Citizen Newhouse : Portrait of a Media Merchant'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Dorothy Parker'
Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for a while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, she was also known as a "masochist whose passion for unhappiness knew no bounds". As philosopher Irwin Edman said, she was "a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack". Her dissection of the jazz age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Coming into the Country'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science'
Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine--on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers. Complications is a book with heart and an excellent bedside manner, celebrating rather than berating doctors for being merely human. --Rob Lightner [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Coyote V. Acme'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Earl of Louisiana'
In the summer of 1959, A. J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events which began when Governor Earl K. Long was committed to a mental institution. Captivated by his subject, Liebling remained to write the fascinating yet tragic story of ?Uncle Earl?s? final year in politics. First published in 1961, The Earl of Louisiana recreates a stormy era of Louisiana politics and captures the style and personality of one of the most colorful and paradoxical figures in the state?s history.
This new edition of the work includes a foreword by T. Harry Williams, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Huey Long: A Biography. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Essays of E.B. White'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fun of It: Stories from the Talk of the Town'
William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.
The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime Talk reporter and New Yorker staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section's most original writers. Only in a collection of Talk stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter's field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano's; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the Times got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Funny Money'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gone : The Last Days of the New Yorker'
Renata Adler's fulminating, fascinating defense and prosecution of her longtime employer The New Yorker may not be the best book ever written on the subject. Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker remains the classic, and Nancy Franklin's profile of Katharine White in Life Stories is more graceful and insightful. But Gone is without doubt the hottest (as ex-editor Tina Brown might say) chronicle of the magazine's history: a scathing portrait of a world with the mad logic of Alice's Wonderland and intrigues as viciously intricate as anything in le Carré.
Adler's narrative zooms like a speedboat through decade after decade of controversy. Still, Gone is essentially a heart-shredding account of the fall of a dynasty--that of longtime editor William Shawn, one of the century's crucial journalistic geniuses. "Mr. Shawn was the father," recalls Adler, "Lillian Ross, the mother. The son was Jonathan Schell; the spirit was J.D. Salinger. This family, it seemed to me, was ferociously judgmental." Yet nobody is more ferocious than the author herself, who was taken into the bosom of this family and stomps all its members to smithereens.
According to Adler, she was one of the lucky few invited into the circle of Mr. Shawn's biological clan, not to mention the parallel world of his mistress and "office wife" Lillian Ross. The author is quick to take Ross to task for her own trash-talking memoir of Shawn. Yet Adler is hardly a whit less destructive in Gone, although she wields the shiv with far greater literary skill. Indeed, those who still worship at the late editor's shrine will be shocked at her portrait of Shawn as a cruel despot who nurtured and destroyed talent according to meticulously articulated, infinitely arbitrary, altogether lunatic rules adjudicated by himself alone. Apparently he had three main responses to criticism: silence, lies, and high-handedness cloaked as high-mindedness. Adler rages at Shawn's hypocrisy, citing his refusal to give his son Wallace Shawn a job on the basis of the magazine's "No Nepotism rule." Not only was this rule nonexistent but the editor rubbed salt in the wound by hiring Schell instead, who happened to be the younger Shawn's college roommate.
Adler notes that the writers who bullied the conflict-averse Shawn tended to prosper, while those who revered him withered away, unpublished. Amazingly, she blames literature's loss of Salinger on Shawn: the ever-elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye "said that the reason he chose not to publish the material he had been working on was to spare Mr. Shawn the burden of having to read, and to decide whether to publish, Salinger writing about sex." Space, alas, prevents full comment on all of Adler's red-hot disclosures. Suffice it to say, however, that like a certain Truman Capote piece she insists on trashing, Adler's memoir of her office family is written in cold blood indeed. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Plains'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Here at the New Yorker'
Brendan Gill sold his first story to the New Yorker in 1936, when he was 21, and has worked there ever since. When his irreverent memoir appeared in 1975, it caused the most delightful of frissons, because the outside world then knew little about his workplace. Gill declares that "in the old Ross-Shawn days, what hadn't happened at the magazine was more worthy of note than what had." In reality, of course, a great deal was happening, and Gill seems to have heard and remembered it all. (This edition also contains a 1997 introduction, complete with acute and politic comments on the Bob Gottlieb and Tina Brown regimes.) But Here at the New Yorker is far from an exposé, consisting instead of the recollections of a lucky man who loves his work and many of his fellows.
Each reader will have his or her favorite anecdotes. Gill remembers taking the subway with Marianne Moore, who was squeezed next to two high school musicians. "Miss Moore stared with admiration at the drum, then said to the boy holding the drumsticks, 'Sonny, when the time comes, give it a big bang just for me.'" And, speaking of big bangs, the old New Yorker was far more squeamish--an organ in which bare nipples were nowhere to be found. Its first editor, Harold Ross, shown a cartoon complete with one such entity, growled: "Take that goddam tit up to Mrs. White and ask her what to do about it." His successor, William Shawn, shared his modesty though not his speech patterns. When Mr. Shawn asked the novelist Henry Green what led him to write Loving, Green's reply wasn't quite what he had expected. Alas, readers, you must turn to page 386 of this endlessly charming book for the offending response. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Hiroshima'
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, few could have anticipated its potential for devastation. Pulitzer prize-winning author John Hersey recorded the stories of Hiroshima residents shortly after the explosion and, in 1946, Hiroshima was published, giving the world first-hand accounts from people who had survived it. The words of Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamara, Father Kleinsorg, Dr. Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto gave a face to the statistics that saturated the media and solicited an overwhelming public response. Whether you believe the bomb made the difference in the war or that it should never have been dropped, "Hiroshima" is a must read for all of us who live in the shadow of armed conflict. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir, Aporia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Joe Gould's Secret'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lanterns and Lances: Variety Encounters w/ Women Men Other chldr As Well As Some Less Confusing Creat'
Humor [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters from the Editor : The New Yorker's Harold Ross'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters of E. B. White'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker'
Way back in 1926 the founding editor of The New Yorker suggested that the title Profiles be registered with the copyright bureau. Harold Ross had ample reason, for though he didn't invent the word itself, he certainly invested it with new significance. Over the years, New Yorker Profiles came to represent a new kind of biography: concise, well-researched, and impeccably written sketches of personalities who were often famous--but just as often not. Take for example "Mr. Hunter's Grave," Joseph Mitchell's 1956 Profile of George H. Hunter, the 87-year-old chairman of the board of trustees of the African Methodist church on Staten Island. This delightful piece leads off a select group of Profiles culled from The New Yorker's first 75 years and collected in Life Stories, edited by David Remnick. More a study of a place and a way of life than of a particular man, Mitchell's Profile stretched the parameters of the form.
The very next piece, Mark Singer's "Secrets of the Magus," is a prime example of what The New Yorker does best. In Ricky Jay, "perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive," Singer has hit on a quirky, eccentric, and fascinating subject--one that offers plenty of scope for writer and reader alike to dip into an arcane and little-known world of magicians, mountebanks, card handlers, and confidence men. Alva Johnston achieves similar success in "The Education of a Prince," his 1932 Profile of con man Harry F. Gerguson, who spent years masquerading as the lost Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff:
The Prince had a glittering career in New York, Boston, Newport, on Long Island, in high-caste settlements along the Hudson, and among the aristocracies of a dozen American cities. Twice he swept over Hollywood in a confetti shower of bad checks. He was repeatedly exposed, but exposure does not embarrass him greatly. He is widely admired today, not for his title but for his own sake. He has convinced a fairly large public that a good imposter is preferable to the average prince.Of course The New Yorker covered plenty of household names, as well, and Life Stories contains sketches of such celebrities as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando. The arts are well represented by pieces on Ernest Hemingway, Anatole Broyard, and David Salle, and even the contributors are stellar, including such well-known scribes as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Truman Capote, and John McPhee.
But where is that famous Profile of the sea by Rachel Carson, you ask? Pauline Kael's piece on Cary Grant or Janet Malcolm's controversial study of psychoanalyst Aaron Green? In his introduction Remnick acknowledges the many great Profiles that did not make it into this volume, explaining that he decided to publish pieces only in full. "I wanted the reader to get the real thing--no excerpts, no snippets," he writes. "As a result the reader will have to go elsewhere for a range of long or multipart Profiles." What's here is choice, though, and die-hard New Yorker aficionados who turn to the Profiles even before perusing the cartoons won't be disappointed by what they find. All in all, Life Stories makes a fine 75th anniversary bouquet for the magazine's many devoted readers. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mr. Personality : Profiles and Talk Pieces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Crowd'
My Crowd is back by popular demand, just in time for the 20th aniversary of its first publication. With the most popular cartoons from his first six books, this cadaverous collection contains a wonderful assortment of goblins, ghosts, and gremlins, along with Addams' own famous "family" of characters that have made his name a household word. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'My Crowd : The Original Addams Family and Other Ghoulish Creatures'
My Crowd is back by popular demand, just in time for the 20th aniversary of its first publication. With the most popular cartoons from his first six books, this cadaverous collection contains a wonderful assortment of goblins, ghosts, and gremlins, along with Addams' own famous "family" of characters that have made his name a household word. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Ears Are Bent'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Kind Of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere'
Susan Orlean has been called a national treasure by The Washington Post and a kind of latter-day Tocqueville by The New York Times Book Review. In addition to having written classic articles for The New Yorker, she was played, with some creative liberties, by Meryl Streep in her Golden Globe Awardwinning performance in the film Adaptation.
Now, in My Kind of Place, the real Susan Orlean takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinoisand even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality.
With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cubas Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyones favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled its known as Horror High; and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.
Vivid, humorous, unconventional, and incomparably entertaining, Susan Orleans writings for The New Yorker have delighted readers for over a decade. My Kind of Place is an inimitable treat by one of Americas premier literary journalists. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Neutral Corner: Boxing Essays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Yorker 75th Anniversary Cartoon Collection'
This 75th anniversary collection pulls together a variety of cartoonists ranging from James Thurber and his ever-battling sexes to Bruce Eric Kaplan and his modern urbans. Readers who are put off by The New Yorker's reputation for stodginess may be pleasantly surprised: a city lot offers Extreme Parking, and one of George Booth's crotchety old ladies urges a silent ogler to "Whistle, you dumb bastard!" There are plenty of sight gags and silly puns (a worried buffalo complains about his cell phone's roaming charges), but don't expect to get through without picking up on a literary reference or two. Roz Chast revisits Eloise at the Plaza hotel at the age of 46 and chronicles the Dialogues of Plato over what to have for lunch. And of course no New Yorker collection would be complete without the sly ghoulishness of Charles Addams. The perfect book for anyone who has ever flipped through a copy of The New Yorker just for the cartoons. --Ali Davis [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Yorker Book of Literary Cartoons'
Welcome to "The New Yorker Book of Literary Cartoons," a timeless tribute to the peerless power of the literary landscape. In 104 drawings, each of them certified by experts to be worth a thousand words (and some of them quite amusing), the essence of reading, writing, publishing, and shelving books is explored in all its glory and absurdity, from the stunning and sublime to the purple and pretentious. Here is Emma Bovary shrugging off those pesky bouts with existential boredom (on the tennis court), Dickens' fateful encounter with a martini (olive or twist?), and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" thoughtfully rewritten for the Beavis and Butt-Head market ("April sucks"). Here is a long-awaited and wholly unprecedented comic takedown of that loftiest of all cultural arenas, the world of belles lettres. It is a world where books stamped with promises from Oprah stand alongside others arranged by the attention span they require, a world where the Bible can now be found in the self-help section. Here, finally, are dead-on portraits and eye-opening ruminations on all things bookish, writerly, and readerly, courtesy of "The New Yorker's" renowned stable of cartoonists, from Charles Barsotti to Roz Chast, Ed Koren to J.B. Handelsman, and Jack Ziegler to Victoria Roberts. In the bestselling tradition of such classics as "The New Yorker Book of Lawyer Cartoons" and "The New Yorker Book of Cat Cartoons -- THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF LITERARY CARTOONS" is manna straight from bookworm heaven. [via]
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THE BOOK HAS NO DUST JACKET AND THE COVER HAS WEAR.THE INSIDE IS IN VERY GOOD CONDITION [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, & Glory of America's Richest Media Empire & the Secretive Man Behind It'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No Hurry to Get Home: The Captivating Memoir of the Unconventional Life and Far-Flung Adventures of a Veteran New York Writer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris to the Moon'
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]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Press'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reporting Back'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism'
For half a century, Lillian Ross has been writing remarkable and timeless journalism for The New Yorker. Her spirited, funny, factual short stories in The Talk of the Town and her unforgettable profiles and other long pieces have won her a legion of admirers. Many credit The New Yorker for the inventive, reportorial breakthroughs that have come to be called literary journalism, and Ross has been an integral part of its traditions. Her books Picture and Portrait of Hemingway were recently listed as two of the Twentieth Century's 100 best works of journalism, and Hemingway himself called Picture "much better than most novels."
With panache, wit, and her own inimitable style, Lillian Ross discusses the questions of what makes a good reporter and what constitutes good journalism. Her years of practicing the art have provided her with much to say about these questions and nowhere is this in better evidence than in her own work-the pieces and profiles long recognized and admired for their freshness, originality, sharpness, humor, and truth. Excerpted here, along with her own commentary, are such classics as "Come In, Lassie!" her first, never before republished piece on Hollywood; her profiles of Francis Coppola, Robin Williams, Adlai Stevenson, John Huston, and Tommy Lee Jones; her two portraits of the Miss America contest-the first one published in 1949; the second fifty years later, and many others.
A primer on good writing, a tribute to the art of journalism, Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism is not only a casebook for writing, it is the unforgettable record of Lillian Ross's joy in the pursuit of excellence in reporting. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sea Battles on Dry Land : Essays'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Show People'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Show People: Profiles in Entertainment'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Snow Leopard'
In the autumn of 1973, the writer Peter Matthiessen set out in the company of zoologist George Schaller on a hike that would take them 250 miles into the heart of the Himalayan region of Dolpo, "the last enclave of pure Tibetan culture on earth." Their voyage was in quest of one of the world's most elusive big cats, the snow leopard of high Asia, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical; Schaller was one of only two Westerners known to have seen a snow leopard in the wild since 1950.
Published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is rightly regarded as a classic of modern nature writing. Guiding his readers through steep-walled canyons and over tall mountains, Matthiessen offers a narrative that is shot through with metaphor and mysticism, and his arduous search for the snow leopard becomes a vehicle for reflections on all manner of matters of life and death. In the process, The Snow Leopard evolves from an already exquisite book of natural history and travel into a grand, Buddhist-tinged parable of our search for meaning. By the end of their expedition, having seen wolves, foxes, rare mountain sheep, and other denizens of the Himalayas, and having seen many signs of the snow leopard but not the cat itself, Schaller muses, "We've seen so much, maybe it's better if there are some things that we don't see."
That sentiment, as well as the sense of wonder at the world's beauty that pervades Matthiessen's book, ought to inform any journey into the wild. --Gregory McNamee [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Stories in an Almost Classical Mode'
Eighteen stories, most of them novella-length, are collected here. They formthe basis of Brodkey's reputation as a great 20th-century American writer andspan three decades. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'This Wild Darkness : The Story of My Death'
It is possible not to care for Harold Brodkey's obsessive, digressive, almost plotless fiction and still be moved by this memoir of his last sufferings until his death, in mid-1996, of AIDS. Brodkey was a writer for whom style was everything, but in his own implacable and untimely mortality he found a subject before which style was nothing. In this assemblage of essays, journal entries, and brief notes, he confronts his illness from a clinical perspective without losing his ironic tone or his genius for minutiae. In a sense, Brodkey wrote nothing but autobiography throughout his career; this, then, is a fitting final chapter. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Thurber Carnival'
After the chuckles and amidst the chortles, the first-time reader of The Thurber Carnival is bound to utter a discreetly voiced "Huh?" Like Cracker Jacks, there are surprises inside James Thurber's delicious 1945 smorgasbord of essays, stories, and sketches. This festival is, surprises and all, a collection of earlier collections (mostly), including, among others, gems from My World--and Welcome to It, Let Your Mind Alone!, and The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. Needless to say, there are also numerous cartoons that, by themselves, are worth the price of admission. While redoubling Thurber's deserved reputation as a laugh-out-loud humorist and teller-of-gentle-tales, it reintroduces him as a thinker-of-thoughts. To wit: his 1933 "Preface to a Life," in which he observes himself while discussing "writers of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words":
To call such persons "humorists," a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.Enjoy the surprises, certainly, but revel in the candy-coated popcorn and peanuts. As in "More Alarms at Night," in which a teenaged Thurber intrudes upon his sleeping father, a skittish man named Charles, because he can't recall the name Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Coincidentally, his father has just been frightened half to death by Thurber's brother, who had earlier stalked into his room saying coldly, "Buck, your time has come."
"Listen," I said. "Name some towns in New Jersey quick!" It must have been around three in the morning. Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. "Don't bother about dressing," I said. "Just name some towns in New Jersey." While he hastily pulled on his clothes--I remember he left his socks off and put his shoes on his bare feet--father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities. I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me. "Newark," he said, "Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Jersey City, Trenton, Paterson--" "It has two names," I snapped. "Elizabeth and Paterson," he said.Of course, things turn out fine, as well they should. And why not? The best of Thurber, which The Thurber Carnival arguably is, is sublime; surprising insight and wry observations tossed lightly and served constantly with effortless good humor and an obvious love for all things gently eccentric. --Michael Hudson [via]

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› Find signed collectible books: 'Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories'
Journalist Joseph Mitchell, whose death in in May 1996 at the age of 87 merited a half-page obituary in the New York Times, pioneered a style of journalism while crafting brilliant magazine pieces for the New Yorker from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of his best reporting, is a 700-page joy to read.
Mitchell lovingly chronicled the lives of odd New York characters. In the pages of Up In the Old Hotel, the reader passes through places such as McSorley's Old Ale House or the Fulton Fish Market that many observers might have found ordinary. But when experienced through Mitchell's gifted eye, the reader will see that these haunts of old New York possess poetry, beauty, and meaning. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Years With Ross'
At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine for more than half a century, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber -- an American icon in his own right -- whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well. "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
