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books tagged “twentieth century”
books tagged “twentieth century”
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Ali and Ninoby Kurban SaidISBN 0394469755 (0-394-46975-5)
Hardcover, Random House
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America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975by George HerringISBN 0394345002 (0-394-34500-2)
Softcover, Knopf
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› Find signed collectible books: 'America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975'Book summary:Widely recognized as a major contribution to the study of American involvement in Vietnam, this comprehensive and balanced account analyzes the ultimate failure of the war, and the impact of the war on US foreign policy. The book seeks to place American involvement in Vietnam in historical perspective and to offer answers to vital questions. This new edition has been necessitated not only by the development in the field, but also by dramatic change in the world in the time since the last edition. [via]
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The Americans Vol. 3: The Democratic Experienceby Daniel J. BoorstinISBN 0394487249 (0-394-48724-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Best of Modern Humorby Mordecai RichlerISBN 0394515315 (0-394-51531-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best of Modern Humor'Book summary:Humorous pieces, most previously published in books and magazines. Authors represented include P.G. Wodehouse, Alexander Theroux, Truman Capote, Garrison Keillor, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, Tom Wolfe, V.S. Naipaul, Thomas Berger, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Mortimer, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Flann O'Brien, Eudora Welty, Peter De Vries, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, Ian Frazier and many others. [via]
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Chimeraby John BarthISBN 0394481399 (0-394-48139-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chimera'Book summary:In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called "stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant," Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths" relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, "There"s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius." [via]
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Chronicle of a Death Foretoldby Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory RabassaISBN 0394530748 (0-394-53074-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold'Book summary:"EXQUISITELY HARROWING . . . . Very strange and brilliantly conceived. . . . A sort of metaphysical murder mystery. . . . The murder will stand among the innumerable murders of modern literature as one of the best and most powerfully rendered."
A mysterious and haunting tale of romance and murder, that begins with the marriage of a man and a woman in love. But when he inexplicably mistreats his beloved on the night of the wedding, he is in turn murdered by her brothers, and we are left with a strange sense of inevitability and passions gone terribly awry.
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Collected Poems of Wallace Stevensby Wallace StevensISBN 0394403304 (0-394-40330-4)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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Corregidoraby Gayl JonesISBN 0394493230 (0-394-49323-0)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Corregidora'Book summary:Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the 19th-century slavemaster who fathered both her grandmother and mother. Ursa's need to ensure that future generations never forget the horror of his rule founders when she is made sterile in a violent fight with her husband. [via]
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Couplesby John UpdikeISBN 0394420667 (0-394-42066-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Couples'Book summary:The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage and adultery in America.
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Dandelion Wineby Ray BradburyISBN 0394496051 (0-394-49605-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dandelion Wine'Book summary:World-renowned fantasist Ray Bradbury has on several occasions stepped outside the arenas of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. An unabashed romantic, his first novel in 1957 was basically a love letter to his childhood. (For those who want to undertake an even more evocative look at the dark side of youth, five years later the author would write the chilling classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.)
Dandelion Wine takes us into the summer of 1928, and to all the wondrous and magical events in the life of a 12-year-old Midwestern boy named Douglas Spaulding. This tender, openly affectionate story of a young man's voyage of discovery is certainly more mainstream than exotic. No walking dead or spaceships to Mars here. Yet those who wish to experience the unique magic of early Bradbury as a prose stylist should find Dandelion Wine most refreshing. --Stanley Wiater [via]
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Danger and Survival : The Political History of the Nuclear Weaponby McGeorge BundyISBN 0394522788 (0-394-52278-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Decline of Radicalism: Reflections of America Todayby Daniel J. BoorstinISBN 0394421841 (0-394-42184-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantby Anne TylerISBN 0394523814 (0-394-52381-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Dispatchesby Michael HerrISBN 0394417887 (0-394-41788-7)
Hardcover, Knopf
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dispatches'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herrs unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature. [via]More editions of Dispatches:
Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friendby Thomas MannISBN 0394422244 (0-394-42224-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Duluthby Gore VidalISBN 0394527380 (0-394-52738-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The English Patientby Michael OndaatjeISBN 039428013X (0-394-28013-X)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The English Patient'Book summary:Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. [via]
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The Enigma of Arrivalby V. S. NaipaulISBN 0394509714 (0-394-50971-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Eternal Curse on Reader of These Pagesby Manuel PuigISBN 039452151X (0-394-52151-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Eva's Manby Gayl JonesISBN 0394499344 (0-394-49934-4)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eva's Man'Book summary:Imprisoned for the bizarre murder of her lover, Eva Medina Canada recalls a life tormented by sexual abuse and emotional violence. Eva's Man is Gayl Jones's second novel. [via]
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Everything We Hadby Al SantoliISBN 0394512693 (0-394-51269-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything We Had'Book summary:everything we had by al santoli [via]
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The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830 to 1980by Elaine ShowalterISBN 0394520211 (0-394-52021-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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God Knowsby Joseph HellerISBN 0394529197 (0-394-52919-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'God Knows'Book summary:Joseph Heller's powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply moving novel is the story of David -- yes, King David -- but as you've never seen him before. You already know David as the legendary warrior king of Israel, husband of Bathsheba, and father of Solomon; now meet David as he really was: the cocky Jewish kid, the plagiarized poet, and the Jewish father. Listen as David tells his own story, a story both relentlessly ancient and surprisingly modern, about growing up and growing old, about men and women, and about man and God. It is quintessential Heller. [via]
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Grendelby John GardnerISBN 0394471431 (0-394-47143-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Guerrillasby V. S. NaipaulISBN 0394498984 (0-394-49898-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Guerrillas'Book summary:A novel of colonialism and revolution, death, sexual violence and political and spiritual impotence. [via]
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Harland's Half Acreby David MaloufISBN 0394539192 (0-394-53919-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Herlandby Charlotte Perkins GilmanISBN 0394503880 (0-394-50388-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouseby Hugh Redwald Trevor-RoperISBN 0394411048 (0-394-41104-8)
Hardcover, Knopf
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse'Book summary:Sir Edmund Backhouse lived like a hermit, but swindled millions in fake deals. A witty piece of historical sleuthing. [via]
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The History of Sexualityby Michel FoucaultISBN 0394417755 (0-394-41775-5)
Hardcover, Pantheon Books
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A House for Mr. Biswasby V.S. NaipaulISBN 039453400X (0-394-53400-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The House of the Spiritsby Isabel AllendeISBN 0394539079 (0-394-53907-9)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The House of the Spirits'Book summary:A best seller and critical success all over the world, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family -- their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all. We begin -- at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country -- in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities -- she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa's fiance, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen -- has summoned -- to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls "the big house on the corner," which is soon populated with Clara's spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban's political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children...their daughter, Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman...the twins, Jaime and Nicol [via]
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Huey Longby T. Harry WilliamsISBN 0394429540 (0-394-42954-0)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Huey Long'Book summary:He was one of the most extraordinary figures in America's political history, a great natural politician who had become, at the time of his assassination, a serious rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency. [via]
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I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Selection from Samuel Beckett's Workby Samuel BeckettISBN 0394406699 (0-394-40669-9)
Hardcover
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The Ice Ageby Margaret DrabbleISBN 0394417909 (0-394-41790-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ice Age'Book summary:Anthony Keating is a middle-aged property developer in Yorkshire in the mid-seventies. Having escaped London's hustle-bustle and survived a heart attack aged just thirty eight, he awaits the return of his lover Alison, who is trying to help her daughter incarcerated in a draconian Eastern bloc country. With debts spiralling out of control, Anthony realises that he and his friends are bound to the engine driving the society in which they live and that should it falter, so will they. The Ice Age is a portrait of a Britain of boom and bust, and greed - and uncannily predicts the Thatcher years. [via]
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In a Dark Woodby Marina WarnerISBN 0394411447 (0-394-41144-7)
Hardcover, Knopf
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Interview With the Vampireby Anne RiceISBN 0394498216 (0-394-49821-6)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Interview With the Vampire'Book summary:In the now-classic novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice refreshed the archetypal vampire myth for a late-20th-century audience. The story is ostensibly a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on innocents, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris. But a summary of this story bypasses the central attractions of the novel. First and foremost, the method Rice chose to tell her tale--with Louis' first-person confession to a skeptical boy--transformed the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and all-too-human figure. Second, by entering the experience of an immortal character, one raised with a deep Catholic faith, Rice was able to explore profound philosophical concerns--the nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perception--in ways not possible from the perspective of a more finite narrator.
While Rice has continued to investigate history, faith, and philosophy in subsequent Vampire novels (including The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, and The Vampire Armand), Interview remains a treasured masterpiece. It is that rare work that blends a childlike fascination for the supernatural with a profound vision of the human condition. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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It's Me, Eddieby Edward LimonovISBN 0394530640 (0-394-53064-0)
Hardcover, Random House
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Kalkiby Gore VidalISBN 0394420535 (0-394-42053-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kalki'Book summary:Bestselling author Gore Vidal joins the ranks of Penguin Classics. To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal's eponymous hero of KALKI, born and bred in America's Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet. [via]
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The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Commandby Burton I. KaufmanISBN 0394341546 (0-394-34154-6)
Softcover, Knopf
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Laughable Lovesby Milan KunderaISBN 0394474120 (0-394-47412-0)
Hardcover
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Letters to a Young Poetby Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Xaver KappusISBN 0394537629 (0-394-53762-9)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters to a Young Poet'Book summary:Letters written over a period of several years on the vocation of writing by a poet whose greatest work was still to come.
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The Life and Loves of a She Devilby Fay WeldonISBN 0394539206 (0-394-53920-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Life Is Elsewhereby Milan KunderaISBN 0394480104 (0-394-48010-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Storiesby E. L. DoctorowISBN 0394525302 (0-394-52530-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories'Book summary:Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In The Writer in the Family, a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced into deceiving a relative through letters. In Wili, an early-twentieth-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. In The Foreign Legation, a girl and an act of political anarchy collide with devastating results. These and other stories flow into the novella Lives of the Poets, in which the images and themes of the earlier stories become part of the narrators unsparing confessions about his own mind, offering a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart.
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Love Is Colder Than Death : The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinderby Robert KatzISBN 0394534565 (0-394-53456-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Eraby David Halberstam, Daniel Joseph SingalISBN 0394368606 (0-394-36860-6)
Hardcover, Knopf
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The Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnsonby Robert A. CaroISBN 0394528360 (0-394-52836-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson'Book summary:Robert Caro's Master of the Senate examines in meticulous detail Lyndon Johnson's career in that body, from his arrival in 1950 (after 12 years in the House of Representatives) until his election as JFK's vice president in 1960. This, the third of a projected four-volume series, studies not only the pragmatic, ruthless, ambitious Johnson, who wielded influence with both consummate skill and "raw, elemental brutality," but also the Senate itself, which Caro describes (pre-1957) as a "cruel joke" and an "impregnable stronghold" against social change. The milestone of Johnson's Senate years was the 1957 Civil Rights Act, whose passage he single-handedly engineered. As important as the bill was--both in and of itself and as a precursor to wider-reaching civil rights legislation--it was only close to Johnson's Southern "anti-civil rights" heart as a means to his dream: the presidency. Caro writes that not only does power corrupt, it "reveals," and that's exactly what this massive, scrupulously researched book does. A model of social, psychological, and political insight, it is not just masterful; it is a masterpiece. --H. O'Billovich [via]
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Maus a Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds Historyby Art SpiegelmanISBN 0394541553 (0-394-54155-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maus a Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History'Book summary:Some historical events simply beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these. Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical perspective as well as an artistic one.
Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.
This is neither easy nor pleasant. However, Vladek Spiegelman and his wife Anna are resourceful heroes, and enough acts of kindness and decency appear in the tale to spur the reader onward (we also know that the protagonists survive, else reading would be too painful). This first volume introduces Vladek as a happy young man on the make in pre-war Poland. With outside events growing ever more ominous, we watch his marriage to Anna, his enlistment in the Polish army after the outbreak of hostilities, his and Anna's life in the ghetto, and then their flight into hiding as the Final Solution is put into effect. The ending is stark and terrible, but the worst is yet to come--in the second volume of this Pulitzer Prize-winning set. --Michael Gerber [via]
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Means of Ascentby Robert A. CaroISBN 0394528352 (0-394-52835-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Means of Ascent'Book summary:The second installment in a projected four-volume biography of LBJ that opened with The Path to Power, Means of Ascent shines a harsh light on the early political years of one of America's most paradoxical presidents. The man who would later ram civil rights legislation through a reluctant Congress, and then be brought down by Vietnam, came out of a political swamp--Caro gives a graphic picture of the Texas democratic political machine at its most corrupt. The climax of the book is LBJ's election to the Senate in 1948, an election he won by 87 dubious votes out of almost a million. That vote arguably changed history. This book won the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. [via]
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The Mind-Body Problemby Rebecca GoldsteinISBN 0394524748 (0-394-52474-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mind-Body Problem'Book summary:Wonderful book from perhaps the greatest living author today. Volume One of his "Border Trilogy." Hardcover. Original jacket. Stated First Edition. Light bumping. PO writing on front end page. Jacket price intact. Looks great. Very Good/Near Fine condition. [via]
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Mists of Avalonby Marion Zimmer BradleyISBN 0394524063 (0-394-52406-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mists of Avalon'Book summary:Even readers who don't normally enjoy Arthurian legends will love this version, a retelling from the point of view of the women behind the throne. Morgaine (more commonly known as Morgan Le Fay) and Gwenhwyfar (a Welsh spelling of Guinevere) struggle for power, using Arthur as a way to score points and promote their respective worldviews. The Mists of Avalon's Camelot politics and intrigue take place at a time when Christianity is taking over the island-nation of Britain; Christianity vs. Faery, and God vs. Goddess are dominant themes.
Young and old alike will enjoy this magical Arthurian reinvention by science fiction and fantasy veteran Marion Zimmer Bradley. --Bonnie Bouman [via]
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Mountbattenby Philip ZieglerISBN 039452098X (0-394-52098-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Moviegoerby Walker PercyISBN 0394437039 (0-394-43703-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Moviegoer'Book summary:This elegantly written account of a young man's search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational. [via]
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Music for Chameleonsby Truman CapoteISBN 0394508262 (0-394-50826-2)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Music for Chameleons'Book summary:In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders them with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, remains one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of his time.
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Myronby Gore VidalISBN 0394494776 (0-394-49477-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essaysby Albert CamusISBN 0394437608 (0-394-43760-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Naked Lunchby William S. BurroughsISBN 0394538838 (0-394-53883-8)
Hardcover, Grove Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Naked Lunch'Book summary:"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamiya notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroine addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. [via]
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The Namesby Don DeLilloISBN 039452814X (0-394-52814-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Names'Book summary:Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.
"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times
"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement
"DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times [via]More editions of The Names:
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Optimist's Daughterby Eudora WeltyISBN 0394480171 (0-394-48017-1)
Hardcover, Random House
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Optimist's Daughter'Book summary:The Optimist's Daughter is a compact and inward-looking little novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner that's slight of page yet big of heart. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital from Mount Salus, Mississippi, complaining of a "disturbance" in his vision. To his daughter, Laurel, it's as rare for him to admit "self-concern" as it is for him to be sick, and she immediately flies down from Chicago to be by his side. The subsequent operation on the judge's eye goes well, but the recovery does not. He lies still with both eyes heavily bandaged, growing ever more passive until finally--with some help from the shockingly vulgar Fay, his wife of two years--he simply dies. Together Fay and Laurel travel to Mount Salus to bury him, and the novel begins the inward spiral that leads Laurel to the moment when "all she had found had found her," when the "deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself" and begins to flow again.
Not much actually happens in the rest of the book--Fay's low-rent relatives arrive for the funeral, a bird flies down the chimney and is trapped in the hall--and yet Welty manages to compress the richness of an entire life within its pages. This is a world, after all, in which a set of complex relationships can be conveyed by the phrase "I know his whole family" or by the criticism "When he brought her here to your house, she had very little idea of how to separate an egg." Does such a place exist anymore? It is vanishing even from this novel, and the personification of its vanishing is none other than Fay--petulant, graceless, childish, with neither the passion nor the imagination to love. Welty expends a lot of vindictive energy on Fay and her kin, who must be the most small-minded, mean-mouthed clan since the Snopeses hit Frenchman's Bend. There's more than just class snobbery at work here (though that surely comes into it too). As Welty sees it, they are a special historical tribe who exult in grieving because they have come to be good at it, and who seethe with resentment from the day they are born. They have come "out of all times of trouble, past or future--the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them."
Fay belongs to the future, as she makes clear; it's Laurel who belongs to the past--Welty's own chosen territory. In her fine memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, Welty described the way art could shine a light back "as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come." Here, in one of her most autobiographical works, the past joins seamlessly with the present in a masterful evocation of grief, memory, loss, and love. Beautifully written, moving but never mawkish, The Optimist's Daughter is Eudora Welty's greatest achievement--which is high praise indeed. --Mary Park [via]
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The Past Recapturedby Marcel ProustISBN 0394439899 (0-394-43989-9)
Hardcover, Random House
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Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Caseby Allen WeinsteinISBN 0394491769 (0-394-49176-9)
Hardcover
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case'Book summary:In this updated version of the landmark book on one of the truest contenders for the title of "trial of the century," historian Allen Weinstein shows beyond all reasonable doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. The book is meticulously detailed and sharply persuasive. Its cast of intriguing characters include Hiss, who maintained his innocence until his death in 1996, and his accuser Whittaker Chambers, a pair who became respective icons for left- and right-wing politics in America during the Cold War years. J. Edgar Hoover and a young Richard Nixon also play key roles. The best quality of Perjury, however, is the uncommon clarity of Weinstein's prose. The very first paragraph neatly sums up the controversial case:
Once upon a time, when the Cold War was young, a senior editor of Time accused the president of the Carnegie Foundation of having been a Soviet agent. The Time editor made his charge stick, aided by an obscure young Congressman from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a tough federal prosecutor, and the director the FBI. As a result, the Endowment president spent forty-four months in jail and became a cause celebre; the magazine editor resigned and died a decade later, still obsessed with the case; the prosecutor became a federal judge; the director of the FBI lived to guard the republic against real or imagined enemies for another twenty-five years; and the young Congressman left obscurity behind to become the thirty-seventh President of the United States.
--John J. Miller [via]More editions of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case:
Pigeon Feathers and Other Storiesby John UpdikeISBN 0394440560 (0-394-44056-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Plagueby Albert CamusISBN 0394440617 (0-394-44061-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Plague'Book summary:The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it. [via]
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New Yorkby Robert A. CaroISBN 0394480767 (0-394-48076-7)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York'Book summary:For the sheer magnitude, depth and authority of its revelations, The Power Broker stands alone---a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the virtually unknown saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the hidden story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York through the past half-century.
Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders have known: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of our time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens--the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses--and brings to light a bonanza of vital new information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.
But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man--an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches--and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself.
Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear--his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"--a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses--an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time--without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system.
Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars--he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder.
This is how he built and dominated New York--before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done. [via]More editions of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York:
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Prick up Your Ears : The Biography of Joe Ortonby John LahrISBN 0394501535 (0-394-50153-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prick up Your Ears : The Biography of Joe Orton'Book summary:John Lahr--New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)--reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978.[via]
"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.
Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.More editions of Prick up Your Ears : The Biography of Joe Orton:
Rachel Papersby Martin AmisISBN 0394491432 (0-394-49143-2)
Hardcover, Knopf
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Ragtimeby E. L. DoctorowISBN 0394469011 (0-394-46901-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ragtime'Book summary:Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]More editions of Ragtime:
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A Raisin in the Sun; A Drama in Three Actsby Lorraine HansberryISBN 0394406885 (0-394-40688-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Raisin in the Sun; A Drama in Three Acts'Book summary:"Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.
Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun."
"The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun," said The New York Times. "It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic." This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff. [via]More editions of A Raisin in the Sun; A Drama in Three Acts:
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The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetryby Paul AusterISBN 0394521978 (0-394-52197-8)
Hardcover, Random House
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The Reiversby William FaulknerISBN 0394442296 (0-394-44229-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Reivers'Book summary:Faulkner offers the reader high comedy in a tale of three Mississippi travellers in Memphis. [via]
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Remembering Babylonby David MaloufISBN 0394280431 (0-394-28043-1)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
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Remembrance of Things Pastby Marcel ProustISBN 039450643X (0-394-50643-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Remembrance of Things Past'Book summary:Perfect Condition! Copyright 1981 by Random House. Translation by Andreas Mayor. Clean and free from markings. Very light shelf wear. All 3 books in excellent condition. Includes all dust jackets and 3-volume case. Expedited shipping available. Guaranteed customer satisfaction. [via]
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Remembrance of Things Past : Swann's Way, Within a Budding Groveby Marcel ProustISBN 0394506448 (0-394-50644-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Return to the Chateau: Preceded by A Girl in Loveby Pauline ReageISBN 0394475895 (0-394-47589-5)
Hardcover, Grove Press
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Robert Lowell : A Biographyby Ian HamiltonISBN 039450965X (0-394-50965-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Robert Lowell : A Biography'Book summary:Robert Lowell: A Biography, by Hamilton, Ian [via]
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Russia under the Bolshevik Regime : Lenin and the Birth of the Totalitarian Stateby Richard PipesISBN 0394502426 (0-394-50242-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Russia under the Bolshevik Regime : Lenin and the Birth of the Totalitarian State'Book summary:Ranging from the Bolshevik takeover in 1918 to the 1924 death of Lenin, the sequel to The Russian Revolution explores the formative years of the Soviet Union under communism and examines the impact of Bolshevik leaders and period events on the USSR. 17,500 first printing. [via]
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The Savage God: A Study of Suicideby A. AlvarezISBN 0394474511 (0-394-47451-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Second Sexby Simone de Beauvoir, H. M. ParshleyISBN 0394444159 (0-394-44415-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Second Sex'Book summary:In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement. [via]
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Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literatureby Elizabeth HardwickISBN 039449069X (0-394-49069-X)
Hardcover, Random House
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Selected Poems, 1923-1975by Robert Penn WarrenISBN 0394405315 (0-394-40531-5)
Hardcover, Random House
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The Singapore Gripby James G. FarrellISBN 0394504836 (0-394-50483-6)
Hardcover, Knopf
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Spring Snowby Yukio Mishima, Michael GallagherISBN 0394442393 (0-394-44239-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Spring Snow'Book summary:Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion. [via]
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The Stories of John Cheeverby John CheeverISBN 0394500873 (0-394-50087-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stories of John Cheever'Book summary:Think of John Cheever's fiction, and a whole world springs to mind--a world of leafy suburbs, summer houses, commuter trains, boarding schools, and inevitably, his own chosen territory, the cocktail hour among WASPs. But it's a mistake to approach Cheever as if he were merely some sort of anthropologist documenting the customs of an obscure and vanishing tribe. Nostalgia and class issues aside, his true subject is the darkness hidden beneath the surface of postwar American life. A case in point is his famous story "The Swimmer," in which an ebullient Neddy Merrill decides to swim home across the backyard pools of his neighbors. In the course of his journey, however, summer gives way to autumn, his neighbors turn against him, there are troubling intimations of disgrace and financial ruin, and he arrives to find his house both locked and empty.
Though these stories deal with bright, prosperous, ostensibly happy people, a cold wind blows through them. Age, illness, financial embarrassment, sex, alcohol, death--all of these threaten his suburban Eden. (Is it himself Cheever is mocking in his ironic "The Worm in the Apple"? "Everyone in the community with wandering hands had given them both a try but they had been put off. What was the source of this constancy? Were they frightened? Were they prudish? Were they monogamous? What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness?") Inanimate objects carry the residue of their past owners' unhappiness and cruelty ("Seaside Houses," "The Lowboy"); expatriates long for but cannot quite find their way home ("The Woman Without A Country," "Boy in Rome"); children vanish or turn out badly (too many stories to count).
All of this is conveyed in prose both graceful and tender. No one is better than Cheever at describing a character's appearance: "He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream." Given his uncanny eye (and ear) for realistic description, it's easy to forget how experimental Cheever could be. His later stories pioneered authorial intrusions in the best postmodern style, and from the beginning, he wrote what would much later be called magical realism. (Think of the sinister broadcasts in "The Enormous Radio," or the phantom love interest in "The Chimera.") A literary event at its publication and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever remains a stunning and enormously influential book. --Mary Park [via]
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Story of Oby Pauline ReageISBN 0394176588 (0-394-17658-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr
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The Summer Bookby Tove JanssonISBN 0394492498 (0-394-49249-8)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Summer Book'Book summary:In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summerits sunlight and stormsinto twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophias grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. On an island, thinks the grandmother, everything is complete. In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.
Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.
The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. [via]More editions of The Summer Book:
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Storiesby Beatrix Potter, Allen AtkinsonISBN 039452845X (0-394-52845-X)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
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Tar Babyby Toni MorrisonISBN 0394423291 (0-394-42329-1)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tar Baby'Book summary:BEAUTIFUL, UN-READ BOOK & DUST COVER, GREAT PRICE !!! [via]
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Tent of Miraclesby Jorge AmadoISBN 039444826X (0-394-44826-X)
Hardcover, Knopf
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Travestiesby Tom StoppardISBN 039417884X (0-394-17884-X)
Softcover, Pub Group West
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Tropic of Capricornby Henry MillerISBN 039447628X (0-394-47628-X)
Hardcover, Bookthrift Co
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Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Pressby Abe PeckISBN 0394527933 (0-394-52793-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Unreliable Memoirsby Clive JamesISBN 0394512634 (0-394-51263-4)
Hardcover, Knopf
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The Uses of Enchantment : The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Talesby Bruno BettelheimISBN 0394497716 (0-394-49771-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Uses of Enchantment : The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales'Book summary:Wicked stepmothers and beautiful princesses ...magic forests and enchanted towers ...little pigs and big bad wolves ...Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for hundreds of years. But what do they really mean? In this award-winning work of criticism, renowned psychoanalyst Dr Bruno Bettelheim presents a thought provoking and stimulating exploration of the best-known fairy stories. He reveals the true content of the stories and shows how children can use them to cope with their baffling emotions and anxieties. [via]
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Washington, D. C.by Gore VidalISBN 0394406893 (0-394-40689-3)
Hardcover, Random House
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What We Talk about When We Talk about Loveby Raymond CarverISBN 0394516842 (0-394-51684-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What We Talk about When We Talk about Love'Book summary:"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued, too famous, at least for his fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other writer similarly loved, imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense of reading pastiche. "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window." "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." What other writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative phrases, no one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true outcomes of the American dream.
Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much. --Mary Park [via]
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Woman on the Edge of Timeby Marge PiercyISBN 0394499867 (0-394-49986-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Woman on the Edge of Time'More editions of Woman on the Edge of Time:
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Powerby Robert CaroISBN 0394499735 (0-394-49973-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power'Book summary:The profound understanding of the uses and abuses of power Robert Caro displayed in his 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is a scathing achievement the author surpassed with panache in this, his second book. Caro's dogged research and refusal to accept received wisdom results in an eye-opening portrait that unforgettably captures the titanic personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). Though stronger on Johnson's duplicity and naked self-promotion than his intelligence and charm, Caro nails it all. He chronicles the evolution of an attention-demanding youth from the Texas hill country into a seasoned congressman who would abandon his ardent espousal of the New Deal as soon as it ceased to be expedient. The dirty details begin with college elections that earn young Lyndon a reputation as a crook and a liar; Caro goes on to unravel financial shenanigans of impressive ingenuity. Johnson's consuming desire to get ahead and his political genius "unencumbered by philosophy or ideology" are staggering. The White House, Great Society, and Vietnam lie ahead when the main narrative closes in 1941, but the roots of Johnson's future achievements and tragic failures are laid bare. This biography may well stand as the best book written in the second half of the 20th century about personal ambition inextricably linked with historic change. --Wendy Smith [via]
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