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books tagged “us”
books tagged “us”
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1898 : The Birth of the American Centuryby David TraxelISBN 0679454675 (0-679-45467-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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About Face : A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clintonby James H. MannISBN 067945053X (0-679-45053-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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All over but the Shoutin'by Rick BraggISBN 0679442588 (0-679-44258-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All over but the Shoutin''Book summary:One reason Rick Bragg won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature articles at the New York Times is that he never forgets his roots. When he writes about death and violence in urban slums, Bragg draws on firsthand knowledge of how poverty deforms lives and on his personal belief in the dignity of poor people. His memoir of a hardscrabble Southern youth pays moving tribute to his indomitable mother and struggles to forgive his drunken father. All Over but the Shoutin' is beautifully achieved on both these counts--and many more. [via]
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All Souls' Rising : A Novelby Madison Smartt BellISBN 0679439897 (0-679-43989-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clayby Michael ChabonISBN 0679450041 (0-679-45004-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay'Book summary:Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park [via]
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American Notesby Charles Dickens, Christopher HitchensISBN 0679601856 (0-679-60185-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Notes'Book summary:American Notes is the fascinating travel journal of one of 19th century America's most celebrated tourists--Charles Dickens. A lively chronicle of his five-month trip around the United States in 1842, the book records the author's adventures journeying by steamboat and stagecoach as well as his impressions of everything from schools and prisons to table manners and slavery. [via]
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Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girlby Anne FrankISBN 0679601244 (0-679-60124-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl'Book summary:Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever. If you've never read this remarkable autobiography, do so. If you have read it, you owe it to yourself to read it again. [via]
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Autobiography of Alice B. Toklasby Gertrude SteinISBN 067972463X (0-679-72463-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Bellocq : Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleansby E. J. Bellocq, John Szarkowski, Susan SontagISBN 0679449752 (0-679-44975-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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A Boy's Own Storyby Edmund White, Allan GurganusISBN 0679642544 (0-679-64254-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Boy's Own Story'Book summary:For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as Americas preeminent gay writer. He has a novelists eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. [He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of A Boys Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents Whites autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.
A Boys Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrators coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations ( I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. ) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.
With A Boys Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking. [via]More editions of A Boy's Own Story:
The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945by Paul FussellISBN 0679640886 (0-679-64088-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Cathedralby Raymond CarverISBN 0679723692 (0-679-72369-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cathedral'Book summary:It was morning in America when Raymond Carver's Cathedral came out in 1983, but the characters in this dry collection of short stories from the forgotten corners of land of opportunity didn't receive much sunlight. Nothing much happens to the subjects of Carver's fiction, which is precisely why they are so harrowing: nothingness is a daunting presence to overcome. And rarely do they prevail, but the loneliness and quiet struggle the characters endure provide fertile ground for literary triumph, particularly in the hands of Carver, who was perhaps in his best form with this effort. [via]
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Civil War Land in Bad Decline : Stories and a Novellaby George SaundersISBN 0679448128 (0-679-44812-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Confessions of Nat Turnerby William StyronISBN 0679601015 (0-679-60101-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Confessions of Nat Turner'Book summary:In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...
The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage. [via]More editions of The Confessions of Nat Turner:
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The Continental Opby Dashiell Hammett, Steven MarcusISBN 0679722580 (0-679-72258-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Continental Op'Book summary:Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continetal Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. In these stories the Op unravels a murder with too many clues, looks for a girl with eyes the color of shadows on polished silver, and tangles with a crooked-eared gunman called the Whosis Kid. [via]
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Crime and Punishmentby Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Black GarnettISBN 0679601007 (0-679-60100-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crime and Punishment'Book summary:Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons [via]
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Decision over Schweinfurt: The U.S. 8th Air Force Battle for Daylight Bombingby Thomas M. CoffeyISBN 0679507639 (0-679-50763-9)
Hardcover, D. McKay Co
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The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Mythby Gar Alperovitz, Sanho Tree, Edward R. Winstead, Kathryn C. Morris, David J. WilliamsISBN 0679443312 (0-679-44331-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Despairby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723439 (0-679-72343-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolutionby Alan TaylorISBN 0679454713 (0-679-45471-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution'Book summary:In 1761, at a boarding school in New England, a young Mohawk Indian named Joseph Brant first met Samuel Kirkland, the son of a colonial clergyman. They began a long and intense relationship that would redefine North America. For nearly fifty years, their lives intertwined, at first as close friends but later as bitter foes. Kirkland served American expansion as a missionary and agent, promoting Indian conversion and dispossession. Brant pursued an alternative future for the continent by defending an Indian borderland nestled between the British in Canada and the Americans, rather than divided by them.
By telling their dramatic story, Alan Taylor illuminates the dual borders that consolidated the new American nation after the Revolution. By constricting Indians within reservation lines, the Americans sought to control their northern boundary with the British Empire, which lingered in Canada. The border became firm as thousands of settlers established farms, held as private property, all around the new reservations. This struggle also pitted the federal government against the leaders of New York, competing to control the lands and the Indians of the border country. They contended for the highest of stakes because the transformation of Indian land constructed the wealth and the power of states, nations, and empires in North America.
In addition to land, the frontier contest pivoted on murders, which repeatedly tested who had legal jurisdiction: Indians or newcomers. To assert power, the contending regimes sought to try and execute Indians or settlers who killed one another. To defend native autonomy, however, the Indians asserted an alternative by covering the graves of victims with presents to console their kin. When the gallows replaced covered graves, the Indians lost their middle position as free peoples.
Taylor breaks with the stereotype of Indians as defiant but doomed traditionalists, as noble but futile defenders of ancient ways. In fact, the borderland Indians demonstrated remarkable adaptability and creativity in coping with the contending powers and with the growing numbers of invading settlers. Led by Joseph Brant, the natives tried to manage, rather than entirely to block, the process of settlement. Taylor shows that they did so in ways meant to preserve Indian autonomy and prosperity. Rather than sell lands for a song to governments, the Indians sought greater control and revenue by leasing lands directly to settler tenants. But neither the British nor the American leaders could accept Indians as landlords, as competitors in the construction of power from land in North America. Once a middle ground, the borderland became a divided ground, partitioned between the British Empire and the American republic. [via]More editions of The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution:
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Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friendby Thomas Mann, Helen T. Lowe-PorterISBN 0679600426 (0-679-60042-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend'Book summary:"The thorn was in my flesh," Mann said about the genesis of Doctor Faustus, which was composed during World War II. "I knew what I was setting out to do and what task I was imposing upon myself: to write nothing else than the novel of my era, disguised as the story of an artist's life, a terribly imperilled and sinful artist."
Adrian Leverkuhn, a former theological student who has become a composer, enters symbolically into a pact with the devil in exchange for two and a half decades of inspired work. Narrated by Serenus Zeitblom, Leverkuhn's faithful friend, this retelling of the Faust legend turns on the composer's slow descent into syphilitic paralysis. Densely orchestrated with musical constructions and what Mann called historical "montage", the book discourses on the tragedy of Germany, the Schonbergian twelve-tone system, Nietzche, the life of Tchaikovsky, and the introduction of syphilis into Europe. Mann described Doctor Faustus as "difficult, weird, uncanny, sad as life." [via]More editions of Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend:
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Dublinersby James JoyceISBN 0679600493 (0-679-60049-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dubliners'Book summary:Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed. The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound. The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist, and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work. It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin. The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland. [via]
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Easter Paradeby Richard YatesISBN 0679722300 (0-679-72230-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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An Empire Wilderness : Travels into America's Futureby Robert D. KaplanISBN 0679451900 (0-679-45190-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Fallby Albert Camus, Justin O'BrienISBN 0679720227 (0-679-72022-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fall'Book summary:Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality. [via]
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The Fire Next Timeby James BaldwinISBN 0679601511 (0-679-60151-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Fortunate Pilgrimby Mario PuzoISBN 067945778X (0-679-45778-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Frostby Robert Frost, John HollanderISBN 0679455140 (0-679-45514-0)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
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Go down, Mosesby William Faulkner, Stanley CrouchISBN 0679601740 (0-679-60174-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Go down, Moses'Book summary:"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." -William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight. [via]
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Go Tell It on the Mountainby James BaldwinISBN 0679601546 (0-679-60154-6)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Go Tell It on the Mountain'Book summary:First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.
Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."
Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin [via]
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Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Storiesby Philip RothISBN 0679601597 (0-679-60159-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories'Book summary:Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. [via]More editions of Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories:
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Hell's Angelsby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 067960331X (0-679-60331-X)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hell's Angels'Book summary:"California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again." Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson's vivid account of his experiences with California's most no-torious motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels. In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial An-gels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, "For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson's book is a thoughtful piece of work." As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell's Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend.
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Holidays in Hellby P. J. O'RourkeISBN 0679724222 (0-679-72422-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Holidays in Hell'Book summary:No doubt about it: P. J. O'Rourke has a bizarre sense of fun. "What I've ... been," he writes in his introduction to Holidays in Hell "is a Trouble Tourist--going to see insurrections, stupidities, political crises, civil disturbances and other human folly because ... because it's fun." Forget Hawaii or the Poconos--O'Rourke gets his jollies in places like war-torn Lebanon where he is greeted at the border by a gun barrel in his face, or Seoul, just in time for election-day violence. Wherever he goes, however, O'Rourke takes his quirky sense of humor, laser eye for detail, and artful way with words: a Philippine army officer is "powerful-looking in a short, compressed way, like an attack hamster," and the Syrian army is described as having "dozens of silly hats, mostly berets in yellow, orange and shocking pink, but also tiny pillbox chapeaux.... The paratroopers wear shiny gold jumpsuits and crack commando units have skin-tight fatigues in a camouflage pattern of violet, peach, flesh tone and vermilion on a background of vivid purple. This must give excellent protective coloration in, say, a room full of Palm Beach divorcees in Lily Pulitzer dresses."
O'Rourke's flip, sarcastic style isn't for everyone, of course; the concept that anyone could find sightseeing in the Beirut or El Salvador of the 1980s fun might prove offensive to more than a few readers right off the bat. But love him or hate him, P. J. O'Rourke knows how to tell a good story, and if you like your travel writing laced with more than a little cynicism, Holidays in Hell could be just the book you've been looking for. [via]
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In Command Of History: Churchill Fighting And Writing The Second World Warby David ReynoldsISBN 0679457437 (0-679-45743-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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In Search of J. D. Salingerby Ian HamiltonISBN 0679722203 (0-679-72220-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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In Search of Lost Timeby Marcel ProustISBN 0679600280 (0-679-60028-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Search of Lost Time'Book summary:The Guermantes Way, in this the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchess de Guermantess château near Combray. It also represents the narrators passage into the rarefied social kaleidoscope of the Guermantess Paris salon, an important intellectual playground for Parisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and manners of the Guermantess drawing room. Here he encounters nobles, officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert de Saint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron de Charlus, and the Prince de Borodino.
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]More editions of In Search of Lost Time:
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Infernoby Dante Alighieri, Gustave Dore, Anthony M. EsolenISBN 0679642617 (0-679-64261-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Inferno'Book summary:"As poetry, Mr. Zappulla's English Dante is successful--. The power of Dante's descriptive poetry should be apparent, and that is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a translator."--Washington Times
In this new rendition of a timeless classic, Italian scholar Elio Zappulla captures the majesty and enduring power of the Inferno, the first of the three canticles of Dante's The Divine Comedy, unarguably one of the masterpieces of world literature. Rendering Dante's terza rima into lyrical blank verse, Zappulla's translation makes accessible to the modern reader the journey of the famed Florentine poet Dante through the nine circles of hell. With Virgil at his side, the great poet descends through horrific landscapes of the damned--dark forests, boiling muck, and burning plains filled with unspeakable punishment, lamentation, and terror--depicted with gruesome detail unmatched in all literature. Richly annotated, this translation takes even the first-time reader on a truth-seeking journey whose imaginative and psychological discoveries make clear why this work persists at the heart of Western culture.
"If Dante's Inferno is a cautionary tale of the history of human depravity, it is also an amazingly complex narrative, treating timeless ethical themes, medieval philosophy and religion, tendentious political issues and deeply personal events."--San Diego Union-Tribune
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via] -
King, Queen, Knaveby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679723404 (0-679-72340-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'King, Queen, Knave'Book summary:The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men's clothing emporium store. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle's condescension in his aunt's bed. [via]
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Ladder of Yearsby Anne TylerISBN 0679441557 (0-679-44155-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ladder of Years'Book summary:The twelfth novel from fiction writer Anne Tyler. [via]
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The Last Gentlemanby Walker PercyISBN 0679602720 (0-679-60272-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Gentleman'Book summary:"The Last Gentleman is lovely and brilliant...a highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Camus," wrote Joyce Carol Oates when Walker Percy's novel was first published in 1966.
Williston Bibb Barrett, the last gentleman of the story, is a displaced Southerner who has dropped out of Princeton owing to a nervous condition that his psychoanalyst associates with an inability to fit into groups. While living in New York City, our wayfarer-hero falls in love with a young woman he spies through a telescope...and sets out on a cross-country odyssey in search of home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.
"The Last Gentleman is a fantastically intuitive report on how America feels to the touch," said Wilfrid Sheed. "Page-for-page and line-for-line this is certainly one of the best-written books in recent memory. As a Southern writer, Percy inherits the remains of a sonorous musical language. But beyond that, his unique point of view forms beautiful sentences like a diamond cutting glass." Alfred Kazin agreed: "Percy is a natural writer, downright, subtle, mischievous . . . a philosopher among novelists."
With a new Introduction by Robert Coles.
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 afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant 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 inau-
gurating 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 The Last Gentleman:
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Laughter in the Darkby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679724508 (0-679-72450-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Laughter in the Dark'Book summary:Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s. [via]
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The Lay of the Landby Richard FordISBN 0679454683 (0-679-45468-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Light in Augustby William FaulknerISBN 067964248X (0-679-64248-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Light in August'Book summary:To declare that Light in August is William Faulkner's finest work would be to invoke debate of irreconcilable conclusion. Yet for many followers of Faulkner, this novel showcases many of his best moments and characters. As usual, he mines the rich soil of Mississippi mud to create his subjects, this time in the form of Reverend Gail Hightower, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas. The issue of black and white and rich and poor is prevalent, though to draw lines that clear would be a disservice to Faulkner's immensely layered text and the multicolored beauty of his writing. [via]
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The Lottery : And Other Storiesby Shirley Jackson, Patrick McGrathISBN 0679640398 (0-679-64039-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lottery : And Other Stories'Book summary:A haunting and powerful collection of stories from one of America's finest writers, with a new Introduction by Patrick McGrath.
Eerie, unforgettable, and by turns terrifying and hilarious, Shirley Jackson's collection of stories plunges us into a unique, brilliantly etched world where the uncanny lurks in the everyday and where nothing is quite what it seems. In "The Lottery," Jackson's most famous work and one of the greatest--and scariest--stories of the twentieth century, a small town gathers for an annual ritual that culminates in a terrible event. In "The Daemon Lover," a woman waits, then searches, for the man she is to marry that day, only to find that he has disappeared as completely as if he had never existed. In "Trial by Combat," a shy woman confronts her kleptomaniac neighbor, and in "Pillar of Salt," a tourist in New York is gradually paralyzed by a city grown nightmarish. Throughout these twenty-five tales, we move through a variety of emotional landscapes full of loneliness and humor, oddity and cruelty, banality and terror, and searing psychological insight. No reader will come away unaffected.
The only collection to appear during Jackson's lifetime, The Lottery and Other Stories reveals the full breadth and power of this truly original writer. [via]More editions of The Lottery : And Other Stories:
Love Stories from the New Yorkerby Roger Angell, New Yorker Magazine StaffISBN 0679457011 (0-679-45701-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGBby Milton Bearden, James RisenISBN 0679463097 (0-679-46309-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB'Book summary:A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, The Main Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them.
Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose through the ranks to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War. The clandestine operations they masterminded took them from the sewers of Moscow to the back streets of Baghdad, from Cairo and Havana to Prague and Berlin, but the action centers on Washington, starting in the infamous "Year of the Spy"--when, one by one, the CIAs agents in Moscow began to be killed, up through to the very last man.
Behind the scenes with the CIA's covert operations in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden led America to victory in the secret war against the Soviets, and for the first time he reveals here what he did and whom America backed, and why. Bearden was called back to Washington after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and was made chief of the Soviet/East Euro-pean Divisionjust in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe, and the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Laced with startling revelations--about fail-safe top-secret back channels between the CIA and KGB, double and triple agents, covert operations in Berlin and Prague, and the fateful autumn of 1989--The Main Enemy is history at its action-packed best. [via]More editions of The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB:
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Maltese Falconby Dashiell HammettISBN 0679722645 (0-679-72264-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maltese Falcon'Book summary:Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is more noir than L.A. Confidential and more vulnerable than Raymond Chandler's Marlowe. In The Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett's Sam Spade novels (including The Dain Curse and The Glass Key), Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back? Spade's solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.
Spade is bigger (and blonder) in the book than in the movie, and his Mephistophelean countenance is by turns seductive and volcanic. Sam knows how to fight, whom to call, how to rifle drawers and secrets without leaving a trace, and just the right way to call a woman "Angel" and convince her that she is. He is the quintessence of intelligent cool, with a wise guy's perfect pitch. If you only know the movie, read the book. If you're riveted by Chinatown or wonder where Robert B. Parker's Spenser gets his comebacks, read the master. --Barbara Schlieper [via]
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The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peaceby Strobe TalbottISBN 0679721657 (0-679-72165-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locustby Nathanael WestISBN 067960278X (0-679-60278-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust'Book summary:"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of
a society obsessed with mass-
produced fantasies foretold much
of what was to come in American life.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.
"The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason." [via]More editions of Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust:
Mona in the Promised Landby Gish JenISBN 0679445897 (0-679-44589-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Most of the Most of S. J. Perelmanby S. J. Perelman, Steve MartinISBN 0679640371 (0-679-64037-1)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Most of the Most of S. J. Perelman'Book summary:This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to 1958--available only in this edition--by the devastatingly witty Perelman, the leading figure of The New Yorker magazine's golden age of humor and one of the most popular American humorists ever. In these hilarious pieces, the charmingly cranky Perelman turns his scathing attention to books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and, last but not least, himself. His self-portrait: "Under a forehead roughly comparable to . . . Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. . . . Before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Sophisticated and supremely mischievous, Perelman is an acrobat of language who turns a phrase and then, before the reader has time to finish admiring his agility, turns it again. [via]
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My Antoniaby Willa Cather, Lucy Hughes-HallettISBN 067944727X (0-679-44727-X)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Antonia'Book summary:It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.
Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]
My Dark Places : An L. A. Crime Memoirby James EllroyISBN 0679441859 (0-679-44185-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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National Audubon Society Field Guide to New Englandby National Audubon Society, Peter AldenISBN 0679446761 (0-679-44676-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England'Book summary:Filled with concise descriptions and stunning photographs the National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England belongs in the home of every New England resident and in the suitcase or backpack of every visitor. This compact volume contains: An easy-to-use field guide for identifying 1 000 of the region s wildflowers trees mushrooms mosses fishes amphibians reptiles birds butterflies mammals and much more; A complete overview of New England s natural history covering geology wildlife habitats ecology fossils rocks and minerals clouds and weather patterns and night sky; An extensive sampling of the area s best parks preserves beaches forests islands and wildlife sanctuaries with detailed descriptions and visitor information for 50 sites and notes on dozens of others. The guide is packed with visual information -- the 1 500 full-color images include more than 1 300 photographs 14 maps and 16 night-sky charts as well as 150 drawings explaining everything from geological processes to the basic features of different plants and animals. For everyone who lives or spends time in Connecticut Maine Massachusetts Rhode Island New Hampshire or Vermont there can be no finer guide to the area s natural surroundings than the National Audubon Society Field Guide to New England. Author: National Audubon Society. [via]
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The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsessionby Susan OrleanISBN 0679447393 (0-679-44739-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession'Book summary:Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors.
The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:
I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.
Even Orlean--so leery of orchid fever that she immediately gives away any plant that's pressed upon her by the growers in Laroche's circle--develops a desire to see a ghost orchid blooming and makes several ultimately unsuccessful treks into the Fakahatchee. Filled with Palm Beach socialites, Native Americans, English peers, smugglers, and naturalists as improbably colorful as the tropical blossoms that inspire them, this is a lyrical, funny, addictively entertaining read. --Barrie Trinkle [via]More editions of The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession:
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Pale Fireby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723420 (0-679-72342-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pale Fire'Book summary:Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.
In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirtiesby Murray KemptonISBN 0679603107 (0-679-60310-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Plagueby Albert Camus, Stuart GilbertISBN 0679720219 (0-679-72021-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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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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Playersby Don DelilloISBN 0679722939 (0-679-72293-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Pninby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'Book summary:Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. [via]
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The Prophetby Kahlil GibranISBN 0679440674 (0-679-44067-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Prophet'Book summary:In a distant, timeless place, a mysterious prophet walks the sands. At the moment of his departure, he wishes to offer the people gifts but possesses nothing. The people gather round, each asks a question of the heart, and the man's wisdom is his gift. It is Gibran's gift to us, as well, for Gibran's prophet is rivaled in his wisdom only by the founders of the world's great religions. On the most basic topics--marriage, children, friendship, work, pleasure--his words have a power and lucidity that in another era would surely have provoked the description "divinely inspired." Free of dogma, free of power structures and metaphysics, consider these poetic, moving aphorisms a 20th-century supplement to all sacred traditions--as millions of other readers already have. --Brian Bruya [via]
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Purgatorioby Dante Alighieri, John CiardiISBN 0679602100 (0-679-60210-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Purgatoryby Anthony M. Esolen, Dante, Gustave DoreISBN 0679642684 (0-679-64268-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Purgatory'Book summary:A brilliant new translation of the centerpiece of The Divine Comedy
Purgatory, the mountain that straightens souls made crooked by the world, is Dantes single most conceptually brilliant creation. Anthony Esolens vivid and innovative new rendering unearths Dantes own voice with unprecedented vigor, accuracy, and a masterly use of English meter. It will set the standard for years to come.
Esolens Introduction incisively explores Dantes theological universe: the nature of Purgatory, how Dante came to invent it, and how Purgatory is finally about restoration, liberation, and friendship. Special features, from an appendix that reproduces key sources to extensive explanatory notes, make this a particularly illuminating edition for both expert and newcomer. [via]More editions of Purgatory:
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The Red Badge of Courageby Stephen Crane, Shelby FooteISBN 0679602968 (0-679-60296-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red Badge of Courage'Book summary:The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, when its author, an impoverished writer living a bohemian life in New York, was only twenty-three. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous. Crane set out to create "a psychological portrayal of fear." Henry Fleming, a Union Army volunteer in the Civil War, thinks "that perhaps in a battle he might run....As far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself." And he does run in his first battle, full of fear and then remorse. He encounters a grotesquely rotting corpse propped against a tree, and a column of wounded men, one of whom is a friend who dies horribly in front of him. Fleming receives his own "red badge" when a fellow soldier hits him in the head with a gun. "The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battlefields," Ford Madox Ford remarked later, "was gone forever." Shelby Foote, author of The Civil
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 afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant 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 inau-
gurating 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 The Red Badge of Courage:
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Red Harvestby Dashiell HammettISBN 0679722610 (0-679-72261-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Red Harvest'Book summary:When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. [via]
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A Regular Guyby Mona SimpsonISBN 0679450912 (0-679-45091-2)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Revolutionary Roadby Richard YatesISBN 0679721916 (0-679-72191-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Road'Book summary:The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.
Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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The Risk Poolby Richard RussoISBN 067972334X (0-679-72334-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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A Scattering of Salts: Poemsby James MerrillISBN 0679441581 (0-679-44158-1)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinsonby Modern Library Staff, Emily DickinsonISBN 0679602011 (0-679-60201-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Shalimar The Clownby Salman RushdieISBN 0679463356 (0-679-46335-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shalimar The Clown'Book summary:Shalimar the Clown is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers, a dazzling novel that brings together the fiercest passions of the heart and the gravest conflicts of our time into an astonishingly powerful, all-encompassing story.
Max Ophuls memorable life ends violently in Los Angeles in 1993 when he is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown. At first the crime seems to be politically motivated Ophuls was previously ambassador to India, and later US counterterrorism chief but it is much more.
Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best-selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious (and willing) Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their villages traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmirs increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance.
With sweeping brilliance, Salman Rushdie portrays fanatical mullahs as fully as documentary filmmakers, rural headmen as completely as British spies; he describes villages that compete to make the most splendid feasts, the mentality behind martial law, and the celebrity of Los Angeles policemen, all with the same genius.
But the main story is only part of the story. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. Shalimar the Clown is a true work of the era of globalization, intricately mingling lives and countries, and finding unexpected and sometimes tragic connections between the seemingly disparate. The violent fate of Kashmir recalls Strasbourgs experience in World War Two; Resistance heroism against the Nazis counterpoints Al-Qaedas terror in Pakistan, North Africa and the Philippines. 1960s Pachigam is not so far from post-war London, or the Hollywood-driven present-day Los Angeles where Maxs daughter by Boonyi, India Ophuls, beautiful, strong-willed, modern, waits, as vengeance plays itself out.
A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of peoples lives, desires and crises India Ophuls desperate search for her real mother, for example; Maxs wifes attempts to deal with his philandering as well as, in typical Rushdie fashion, a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.
Shalimar the Clown is steeped in both the Hindu epic Ramayana and the great European novelists, melding the storytelling traditions of east and west into a magnificently fruitful blend and serves, itself, as a corrective to the destructive clashes of values it scorchingly depicts. Enthralling, comic and amazingly abundant, it will no doubt come to be seen as one of the key books of our time.
The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassadors drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his days appointments, trying not to let the card shake. He knew Shalimars real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnasts body and a tragedians face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the now-destroyed old synagogue, and found himself marvelling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley. . . .
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The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North Americaby David Allen SibleyISBN 067945120X (0-679-45120-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Sister Carrieby Theodore DreiserISBN 067960250X (0-679-60250-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sister Carrie'Book summary:Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.
Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]
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Sleepless Nightsby Elizabeth HardwickISBN 0679724265 (0-679-72426-5)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Sophie's Choiceby William StyronISBN 0679602895 (0-679-60289-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sophie's Choice'Book summary:Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
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The Souls of Black Folkby W. E. B. Du BoisISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Souls of Black Folk'Book summary:William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.
With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]
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A Sport and a Pastimeby James SalterISBN 0679601562 (0-679-60156-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Sport and a Pastime'Book summary:"A Sport and a Pastime is as nearly perfect as any American fiction
I know," Reynolds Price wrote of James Salter's 1967 novel that tells of the mismatched love affair between Phillip Dean, a Yale dropout adrift in Europe, and Anne-Marie Costallat, a young French shopgirl. An erotic tour de force, licentious yet pure, it is also a hymn to provincial France and has been admired and quoted from since its first publication. Its stunning knowledge and insight have the power to change lives.
It brings a kind of splendor to the life that refuses to bow to conven-
tion or mores, and, like Cavafy's poems, evokes the illicit in a way that endows it with an astonishing beauty. Brilliantly written and overwhelming in its effect, it remains a triumph on every level. [via]More editions of A Sport and a Pastime:
The Sportswriterby Richard FordISBN 0679454519 (0-679-45451-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Stars in Their Coursesby Shelby FooteISBN 0679601120 (0-679-60112-0)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stars in Their Courses'Book summary:Shelby Foote, who cut such a courtly figure in Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War, is an uncommonly graceful writer as well, and this careful study of the 1863 Gettysburg campaign assumes the contours of a classical tragedy. Foote positions readers on the field of battle itself, among swirling smoke and clattering grapeshot, and invites us to feel for ourselves its hellishness: "men on both sides were hollering as they milled about and fired, some cursing, others praying ... not a commingling of shouts and yells but rather like a vast mournful roar." Foote's fine book is history as literature, and a welcome addition to any Civil War buff's library. [via]
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Swann's Wayby Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence KilmartinISBN 067972009X (0-679-72009-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Swann's Way'Book summary:The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria--this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.
--VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss. The recollection of the narrator's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte leads to an account of Swann's passion for Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins.
The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions. [via] -
This New Ocean : The Story of the First Space Ageby William E. BurrowsISBN 0679445218 (0-679-44521-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'This New Ocean : The Story of the First Space Age'Book summary:More comprehensive than The Right Stuff, more critical than Apollo 13, This New Ocean is a near-perfect history of the men (and occasional women) who have "slipped the surly bonds of Earth." Eminent science journalist and space expert William E. Burrows covers just about everyone in history--from Daedalus to John Glenn--who ever designed or flew a rocket, trying to "ride the arrow" to the moon and beyond. It's a trail of testosterone from start to finish, but it makes for an engrossing read. One of Burrows's most interesting points is that without the cold war we never would have made it into space. He writes, "...the rocket would forever serve two masters at the same time, or rather a single master with two dispositions: one for war and one for peace." Werner von Braun, Robert Goddard, and other rocketry pioneers may indeed have wanted to explore space, but they knew the only way to get there was on the military's back.
Burrows extensively researched his subject, and he seems to want to include a little bit of everything; too much detail bogs down the narrative in places. Then again, he is no apologist for the space programs of the United States and the former U.S.S.R., and to tell their complete stories requires laying a great deal of political and scientific groundwork. When it comes to the great, memorable moments in space history, Burrows really shines. In telling the stories of Sputnik's first orbit, Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, Challenger's fiery death, and Sojourner's Martian road trip, he captures both the gee-whiz technological accomplishment and the very human emotions of the men and women involved. --Therese Littleton [via]
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This Side of Paradiseby F. Scott FitzgeraldISBN 0679447237 (0-679-44723-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'This Side of Paradise'Book summary:Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War. It also contains a new introduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popular reception of the book when it came out in 1920. [via]
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The Thurber Carnivalby James ThurberISBN 0679600892 (0-679-60089-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Thurber Carnival'Book summary: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]More editions of The Thurber Carnival:
A Turn in the Southby V.S. NaipaulISBN 0679724885 (0-679-72488-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Unfinished Nationby Alan BrinkleyISBN 0679454594 (0-679-45459-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Up from Slavery: An Autobiographyby Booker T. WashingtonISBN 0679640142 (0-679-64014-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Up from Slavery: An Autobiography'Book summary:Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the greatest American autobiographies ever written. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential, agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans like "cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society. [via]
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Washington, D. C.by Gore VidalISBN 0679602917 (0-679-60291-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Where I'm Calling fromby Raymond CarverISBN 0679722319 (0-679-72231-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where I'm Calling from'Book summary:The last story collection published during Carver's life (he died in 1988) contains most of his greatest hits from his earlier books, as well as seven stories that hadn't been collected up to that point. The breadth of the collection makes these 37 stories an extremely complete map of Carver territory, of a particular area of America and of the specific texture of the people Carver writes about -- their difficult attempts at survival in a world where happiness does not arrive wrapped up in neat packages but comes in far more peculiar parcels, if it comes at all. [via]
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Will America Grow up Before It Grows Old?by Peter G. PetersonISBN 0679452567 (0-679-45256-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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The Wings of the Doveby Henry James, Grey GowrieISBN 0679455124 (0-679-45512-4)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wings of the Dove'Book summary:The Wings of the Dove is a classic example of Henry James's morality tales that play off the naiveté of an American protagonist abroad. In early-20th-century London, Kate Croy and Merton Densher are engaged in a passionate, clandestine love affair. Croy is desperately in love with Densher, who has all the qualities of a potentially excellent husband: he's handsome, witty, and idealistic--the one thing he lacks is money, which ultimately renders him unsuitable as a mate. By chance, Croy befriends a young American heiress, Milly Theale. When Croy discovers that Theale suffers from a mysterious and fatal malady, she hatches a plan that can give all three characters something that they want--at a price. Croy and Densher plan to accompany the young woman to Venice where Densher, according to Croy's design, will seduce the ailing heiress. The two hope that Theale will find love and happiness in her last days and--when she dies--will leave her fortune to Densher, so that he and Croy can live happily ever after. The scheme that at first develops as planned begins to founder when Theale discovers the pair's true motives shortly before her death. Densher struggles with unanticipated feelings of love for his new paramour, and his guilt may obstruct his ability to avail himself of Theale's gift. James deftly navigates the complexities and irony of such moral treachery in this stirring novel. [via]
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