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› Find signed collectible books: 'All Souls' Rising'
In his breathtaking and powerful novel that garnered nominations for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Madison Smartt Bell leaves the dark contemporary world he has so brilliantly made his own in nine previously acclaimed novels and short story collections, such as Save Me, Joe Louis. Now he turns to the past and brings viscerally to life the slave rebellion that would bring an end to the white rule of Haiti in the late eighteenth century. The result is an explosive, epic historical novel of astonishing depth and range, catapulting Bell into the ranks of the finest living authors. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Are You in the House Alone?'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of War: Sunzi Bing Fa'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bacchae and Other Plays'
The plays of Euripides have stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. This volume, containing "Phoenician Women", "Bacchae", "Iphigenia at Aulis", "Orestes", and "Rhesus" completes the new editions of "Euripides in Penguin Classics". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bacchae and Other Plays'
The plays of Euripides have stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. This volume, containing Phoenician Women, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Orestes, and Rhesus
completes the new editions of Euripides in Penguin Classics.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Basketball Diaries'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Berlin Noir'
Now published in one paperback volume, these three mysteries are exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany -- richer and more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.) [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The BFG'
Evidently not even Roald Dahl could resist the acronym craze of the early eighties. BFG? Bellowing ferret-faced golfer? Backstabbing fairy godmother? Oh, oh ... Big Friendly Giant! This BFG doesn't seem all that F at first as he creeps down a London street, snatches little Sophie out of her bed, and bounds away with her to giant land. And he's not really all that B when compared with his evil, carnivorous brethren, who bully him for being such an oddball runt. After all, he eats only disgusting snozzcumbers, and while the other Gs are snacking on little boys and girls, he's blowing happy dreams in through their windows. What kind of way is that for a G to behave?
The BFG is one of Dahl's most lovable character creations. Whether galloping off with Sophie nestled into the soft skin of his ear to capture dreams as though they were exotic butterflies; speaking his delightful, jumbled, squib-fangled patois; or whizzpopping for the Queen, he leaves an indelible impression of bigheartedness. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Brothers Karamazov'
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime and Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, and profligacy. Significantly, the book was on Tolstoy's bedside table when he died. Readers in every language have since accepted Dostoevsky's own evaluation of this work and have gone further by proclaiming it one of the few great novels of all ages and countries. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Cannery Row'
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America?s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers?and to the many who revisit them again and again."
[via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Causing Death and Saving Lives'
The moral problems of abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, capital punshiment, war and othe life-or-death choices. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Comedy of Dante Alighieri'
Dante (12651321) is the greatest of Italian poets, and his Divine Comedy is the finest of all Christian allegories. To the consternation of his more academic admirers, who believed Latin to be the only proper language for dignified verse, Dante wrote his Comedy in colloquial Italian, wanting it to be a poem for the common reader. Taking two threads of a story that everybody knew and loved the story of a vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and the story of the lover who has to brave the Underworld to find his lost lady he combined them into a great allegory of the souls search for God. He made it swift, exciting and topical, lavishing upon it all his learning and wit, all his tenderness, humour and enthusiasm, and all his poetry. In Paradise, which T. S. Eliot among others has found either incomprehensible or intensely exciting, Dante journeys through the encircling spheres of heaven towards God. Translated by and introduced by Dorothy L. Sayers [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine'
Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante plunges to the very depths of Hell and embarks on his arduous journey towards God. Together they descend through the nine circles of the underworld and encounter the tormented souls of the damned - from heretics and pagans to gluttons, criminals and seducers - who tell of their sad fates and predict events still to come in Dante's life. In this first part of his "Divine Comedy", Dante fused satire and humour with intellect and soaring passion to create an immortal Christian allegory of mankind's search for self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crime and Punishment'
Table of Contens:
Translator's Preface
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
Epilogue
Search a title: enter Forward2
forward2.wordpress.com [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crucible'
Release Date: October 28, 1976. The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft-and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witchhunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can. "A drama of emotional power and impact" -New York Post [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Crucible : A Screenplay'
The masterpiece of American drama is now a major motion picture from 20th Century Fox, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Paul Scofield. Set during the witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, The Crucible recounts the vengeance, mass hysteria, and collective evil that poisoned this small town. photos, some in color. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Descent into Hell'
Many have made the journey. None have ever returned. Wandering through a dark forest, Dante finds himself at the gates to the underworld. Despite his terror, he dares to enter the Circles of Hell, where the damned lie in torment. As he descends deeper, he encounters wild-eyed sinners, sees the three-headed, howling hound Cerberus, and meets a long-dead prophet who foretells Dante's destiny. He passes through realms of fire and ice, and at last reaches the frozen heart of Hell where the hideous Satan, greatest of all the damned, lies in wait. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Divine Comedy'
This splendid verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum provides an entirely fresh experience of Dante's great poem of penance and hope. As Dante ascends the Mount of Purgatory toward the Earthly Paradise and his beloved Beatrice, through "that second kingdom in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, " all the passion and suffering, poetry and philosophy are rendered with the immediacy of a poet of our own age. With extensive notes and commentary prepared especially for this edition.
"The English Dante of choice."--Hugh Kenner.
"Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths."--Robert Fagles, Princeton University.
"Tough and supple, tender and violent . . . vigorous, vernacular . . . Mandelbaum's Dante will stand high among modern translations."-- "The Christian Science Monitor" [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Equus'
In "equus," which took critics and public alike by storm and has gone on to become a modern classic, peter shaffer depicts the story of a deranged youth who blinds six horses with a spike. Through a psychiatrist's analysis of the events, shaffer creates a chilling portrait of how materialism and convenience have killed our capacity for worship and passion and, consequently, our capacity for pain. Rarely has a playwrite created an atmosphere and situation that so harshly pinpoint the spiritual and mental decay of modern man [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Eyrbyggja Saga'
This is an Icelandic saga which mixes realism with wild gothic imagination and history with eerie tales of hauntings. It dramatizes a 13th century view of the past, from the pagan anarchy of the Viking age to the settlement of Iceland, the coming of Christianity and the beginnings of organized society. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Soldier Svejk: And His Fortunes in the World War'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Grapes of Wrath'
When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.
The prize must have come, at least in part, because alongside the poverty and dispossession, Steinbeck chronicled the Joads' refusal, even inability, to let go of their faltering but unmistakable hold on human dignity. Witnessing their degeneration from Oklahoma farmers to a diminished band of migrant workers is nothing short of crushing. The Joads lose family members to death and cowardice as they go, and are challenged by everything from weather to the authorities to the California locals themselves. As Tom Joad puts it: "They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."
The point, though, is that decency remains intact, if somewhat battle-scarred, and this, as much as the depression and the plight of the "Okies," is a part of American history. When the California of their dreams proves to be less than edenic, Ma tells Tom: "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on." It's almost as if she's talking about the very novel she inhabits, for Steinbeck's characters, more than most literary creations, do go on. They continue, now as much as ever, to illuminate and humanize an era for generations of readers who, thankfully, have no experiential point of reference for understanding the depression. The book's final, haunting image of Rose of Sharon--Rosasharn, as they call her--the eldest Joad daughter, forcing the milk intended for her stillborn baby onto a starving stranger, is a lesson on the grandest scale. "'You got to,'" she says, simply. And so do we all. --Melanie Rehak [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Gatsby'
Kathleen Parkinson places this brilliant and bitter satire on the moral failure of the jazz age firmly in the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and times. She explores the intricate patterns of the novel, its chronology, locations, imagery and use of colour, and how these contribute to a seamless interplay of social comedy and symbolic landscape. She devotes a perceptive chapter to F. Scott Fitzgerald's controversial portrayal of women and goes on to discuss how the central characters, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, embody and confront the dualism inherent in the American Dream.
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hedda Gabler and Other Plays'
In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. "The Pillars of the Community" 1877 depicts a corrupt shipowner's struggle to hide the sins of his past at the expense of another man's reputation, while in "The Wild Duck" 1884 an idealist, believing he must tell the truth at any cost, destroys a family by exposing the lie behind his friend's marriage. And "Hedda Gabler" 1890 portrays an unhappily married woman who is unable to break free from the conventional life she has created for herself, with tragic results for the entire family. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII'
This devastating account of the ecclesiastical career of Eugenio Pacelli (1876-1958), who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, is all the more powerful because British historian John Cornwell maintains throughout a measured though strongly critical tone. After World War II, murmurs of Pacelli's callous indifference to the plight of Europe's Jews began to be heard. A noted commentator on Catholic issues, Cornwell began research for this book believing that "if his full story were told, Pius XII's pontificate would be exonerated." Instead, he emerged from the Vatican archives in a state of "moral shock," concluding that Pacelli displayed anti-Semitic tendencies early on and that his drive to promote papal absolutism inexorably led him to collaboration with fascist leaders. Cornwell convincingly depicts Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli pursuing Vatican diplomatic goals that crippled Germany's large Catholic political party, which might otherwise have stymied Hitler's worst excesses. The author's condemnation has special force because he portrays the admittedly eccentric Pacelli not as a monster but as a symptom of a historic wrong turn in the Catholic Church. He meticulously builds his case for the painful conclusion that "Pacelli's failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism." --Wendy Smith [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Homer in English'
This text is one of the volumes in the "New Poets in Translation" series. It focuses on the epic poems of Homer, one of the most translated authors in literature. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'House Gun'
"There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. To visualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows; that is a blank in the dark."
Privileged whites in post-apartheid South Africa, Harald and Claudia Lindgard have managed to live the better part of 50 years without ever confronting the deepest shadows in their culture or in their own souls. Though they conceive of themselves as liberal-minded, neither has ever taken any active political stand; neither has ever been in any black person's home. Harald sits on the board of an insurance company; Claudia is a compassionate doctor. Neither of them has ever been inside a courtroom before; neither has ever been inside a prison. When their architect-son, Duncan, is arrested for murder, both know that the charge is preposterous. But Duncan himself fails to deny his guilt, and his parents are brought by a harsh and ungainly process to accept the possibility that he has committed an unthinkable crime.
Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun is a gravely sustained exploration of their long-delayed but necessary descent into an intimate acquaintance with the culture of violence that surrounds them and that is "the common hell of all who are associated with it." The novel is a mystery, but not in the usual sense of the whodunit. Here the question of who quickly gives way to why and thence to other, still deeper quandaries of culpability, both immediate and ultimate. The enigmatic Duncan becomes a dark mirror in which his stunned parents must desperately grope for a new vision of themselves and their world--a vision that will not shatter, as their old one has, under a single blow from reality.
Gordimer's prose is mannered and severe; humor is rare, or absent. "As the couple emerge into the foyer of the courts, vast and lofty cathedral echoing with the susurration of its different kind of supplicants gathered there, Claudia suddenly breaks away, disappearing towards the sign indicating toilets. Harald waits for her among these people patient in trouble, no choice to be otherwise, for them, he is one of them, the wives, husbands, fathers, lovers, children of forgers, thieves and murderers." This difficult exposition is the reader's own dark mirror, where we as spectators fumble from one dubious explanation to the next--a twisted reflection always reminding us that, underlying this social tragedy, there is a mystery play in the old sense, and an unanswerable question: What is a human being? Paragraph after paragraph, the reader is led into deeper and deeper perceptions of the sensibilities and the dilemmas of these characters--into a quiet intimacy with their trouble that is sometimes acutely uncomfortable, but which pays off richly in an ending that reconciles our sense of the horror of violence with our desire to believe in the value of each life. --Daniel Hintzsche [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Iliad'
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization - an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture.
The story of the Iliad centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus' killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer's theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background. The Iliad is the first of the great tragedies.
@RageAgainstTheAchaean Pissed. I am so, so very pissed.
First I have to go to this beach. Then I have to kill all these dudes. And NOW now! This prick stole my biscuit. Who does that? Am I right?
Cant resolve this problem on my own calling Mom!
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Iliad'
One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, the besieged city of Ilium, the feud between the gods, and the fate of mortals.
@RageAgainstTheAchaean Pissed. I am so, so very pissed.
First I have to go to this beach. Then I have to kill all these dudes. And NOW now! This prick stole my biscuit. Who does that? Am I right?
Cant resolve this problem on my own calling Mom!
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Iliad of Homer'
Pope spent his formative years as a poet translating Homer, beginning with the Iliad, and in his translation he successfully found a style that answers the sublimity and grace of Homer. Steven Shankman provides scholarly critical apparatus for this Penguin English Poets edition, which is based on the 1743 edition that contains the poet's final revisions. Pope's Preface and the three indexes are also included. Most importantly, this edition makes available for the first time in paperback Pope's notes in their entirety, enabling us to observe one poetic genius illuminate the work of another. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Iliad: The Epic Story of Troy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Lake of the Woods'
Tim O'Brien has been writing about Vietnam in one way or another ever since he served there as an infantryman in the late 1960s. His earliest work on the subject, If I Die in a Combat Zone, was an intensely personal memoir of his own tour of duty; his books since then have featured many of the same elements of fear, boredom, and moral ambiguity but in a fictional setting. In 1994 O'Brien wrote In the Lake of the Woods, a novel that, while imbued with the troubled spirit of Vietnam, takes place entirely after the war and in the United States. The main character, John Wade, is a man in crisis: after spending years building a successful political career, he finds his future derailed during a bid for the U.S. Senate by revelations about his past as a soldier in Vietnam. The election lost by a landslide, John and his wife, Kathy, retreat to a small cabin on the shores of a Minnesota lake--from which Kathy mysteriously disappears.
Was she murdered? Did she run away? Instead of answering these questions, O'Brien raises even more as he slowly reveals past lives and long-hidden secrets. Included in this third-person narrative are "interviews" with the couple's friends and family as well as footnoted excerpts from a mix of fictionalized newspaper reports on the case and real reports pertaining to historical events--a mélange that lends the novel an eerie sense of verisimilitude. If Kathy's disappearance is at the heart of this work, then John's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam is its core, and O'Brien uses it to demonstrate how wars don't necessarily end when governments say they do. In the Lake of the Woods may not be true, but it feels true--and for Tim O'Brien, that's true enough. --Alix Wilber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kiss Me, Judas'
In his extremely dark but very effective first thriller, former cabdriver and homeless counselor Will Christopher Baer takes that old urban legend of the man who wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice to discover that somebody has removed one of his kidneys and whips it up into a modernized Edgar Allan Poe nightmare. Baer's hero is in fact called Phineas Poe--an ex-cop who spent six years digging up dirt in and on the Denver P.D.'s Internal Affairs Division. On his first night out after a nervous breakdown and a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude who drugs his drink and deftly removes his kidney.
Poe heads for the Witch's Teat, a sex shop where his friend Crumb works. "Crumb isn't really a doctor. He does cheap abortions and gunshot wounds and even dental work for the mad and desperate," Baer writes in deceptively plain present-tense prose, which quickly mesmerizes like electronic music. "Crumb reads a lot. He has a closet full of old surgical textbooks and a lot of stolen equipment. And he doesn't try to fake you. If you come to him with a ruptured bowel or a crushed spine, he gives you a cup of tea and sends you to the hospital." Poe learns that his kidney has been replaced by a bag of heroin--which could kill him if it dissolves. Intent on retrieving his stolen organ, he traces Jude to a bowling alley called the Inferno. Strangely enough, with Jude he reluctantly discovers the chance of love and family that he thought was gone forever when his wife died. In lesser hands, this flash of light in a roomful of noir could easily have spoiled everything. But Baer makes it all seem as natural as whistling in the dark. --Dick Adler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Miserables'
He was no longer Jean Valjean, but No. 24601
Victor Hugos tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty. A compelling and compassionate view of the victims of early nineteenth-century French society, Les Misérables is a novel on an epic scale, moving inexorably from the eve of the battle of Waterloo to the July Revolution of 1830.
Norman Dennys introduction to his lively English translation discusses Hugos political and artistic aims in writing Les Misérables.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Metamorphoses'
The first English translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, "Golding's Metamorphoses" (1567) decisively influenced Shakespeare, Spenser and the character of English Renaissance writing. Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends in which men and women are transformed, often by love - into flowers, trees, stones and stars. This robustly vernacular version adds a Christian moral framework, clarifies obscurities and gives an English flavour to the rustic settings, thus making readily available to later writers a treasure-trove of comic, eerie and erotic tales. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Metamorphoses'
Ovids sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformationoften as a result of love or lustwhere men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic and yet playful, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Metamorphosis and Other Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Moonstone'
A novel which reflects the underside of Victorian life. A tale of a stolen jewel, foreign menace and violent death. A telling social portrait. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'My Antonia'
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]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Neverending Story'
Small and insignificant Bastian Balthazar Bux is nobody's idea of a hero, least of all his own. Through the pages of an old book he discovers a mysterious world of enchantment - but a world that is falling into decay. The great task of making things well again falls on Bastian and so begins a dazzling, magical adventure. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'News of a Kidnapping'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oliver Twist'
This fiercely comic tale stands in marked contrast to its genial predecessor, "The Pickwick Papers." Set against London's seedy back street slums, "Oliver Twist" is the saga of a workhouse orphan captured and thrust into a thieves' den, where some of Dickens's most depraved villains preside: the incorrigible Artful Dodger, the murderous bully Sikes, and the terrible Fagin, that treacherous ringleader whose grinning knavery threatens to send them all to the "ghostly gallows." Yet at the heart of this drama is the orphan Oliver, whose unsullied goodness leads him at last to salvation. In 1838 the publication of "Oliver Twist" firmly established the literary eminence of young Dickens. It was, according to Edgar Johnson, "a clarion peal announcing to the world that in Charles Dickens the rejected and forgotten and misused of the world had a champion." [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Our Mutual Friend'
Our Mutual Friend was the last novel Charles Dickens completed and is, arguably, his darkest and most complex. The basic plot is vintage Dickens: an inheritance up for grabs, a murder, a rocky romance or two, plenty of skullduggery, and a host of unforgettable secondary characters. But in this final outing the author's heroes are more flawed, his villains more sympathetic, and the story as a whole more harrowing and less sentimental. The mood is set in the opening scene in which a riverman, Gaffer Hexam, and his daughter Lizzie troll the Thames searching for drowned men whose pockets Gaffer will rifle before turning the body over to the authorities. On this particular night Gaffer finds a corpse that is later identified as that of John Harmon, who was returning from abroad to claim a large fortune when he was apparently murdered and thrown into the river.
Harmon's death is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the novel. It seems the fortune was left to the young man on the condition that he marry a girl he'd never met, Bella Wilfer. His death, however, brings a new heir onto the scene, Nicodemus Boffin, the kind-hearted but low-born assistant to Harmon's father. Boffin and his wife adopt young Bella, who is determined to marry money, and also hire a mysterious young secretary, John Rokesmith, who takes an uncommon interest in their ward. Not content with just one plot, Dickens throws in a secondary love story featuring the riverman's daughter, Lizzie Hexam; a dissolute young upper-class lawyer, Eugene Wrayburn; and his rival, the headmaster Bradley Headstone. Dark as the novel is, Dickens is careful to leaven it with secondary characters who are as funny as they are menacing--blackmailing Silas Wegg and his accomplice Mr. Venus, the avaricious Lammles, and self-centered Charlie Hexam. Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most satisfying novels, and a fitting denouement to his prolific career. --Alix Wilber [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Phantom Of The Opera'
The thrilling story of the 'Opera Ghost', legendary for making performers at the Paris Opera House apprehensive when they sit in their dressing-rooms or walk alone in the building's corridors. But it isn't until the triumphant performance the sensual Christine and her startling disappearance that a sense of dread begins to pervade. In an ever increasing pattern of fear and violence, the phantom of the opera begins to strike, but always with the beautiful young singer at the centre of his macabre desires. Filled with the colour and theatrical spectacle of the Paris Opera House and the fascination of love transformed into murderous obsession, this classic work of suspense remains a rivetting journey into the dark regions of the human heart. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Raising Holy Hell'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Regeneration'
Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear -- the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing -- it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Richard III'
"Now is the winter of our discontent," intones Richard, Duke of Gloucester at the beginning of Shakespeare's Richard III, one of his most abidingly popular plays, and one of the most chilling portrayals of political tyranny ever seen on stage. Richard emerges from the chaos which surrounds the reign of Henry VI, already dramatised by Shakespeare earlier in his career, determined to become king by removing his elder brother Edward IV by convincing him that their brother Clarence is plotting against the crown. The deaths of both Clarence and Edward take Richard inexorably towards the crown, and the series of murders and conspiracies that Richard masterminds confirms his claim that "I am determined to prove a villain". Richard's political and sexual charisma are truly chilling, and his seduction of Lady Anne, over her husband's corpse is one of the most disturbing scenes in Shakespeare. At another level, the play is also a strongly anti-Yorkist play, which has a vested interest in portraying Richard as such as vicious tyrant before seeing him toppled, ushering in a period of rule which prefigured the Tudor dynasty of which Elizabeth I was herself a part. The play has had a deep and lasting influence on audiences and writers; Brecht rewrote the play as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, while both Laurance Olivier and Ian Mckellen have produced memorable film versions of Richard III, the latter updating the play into a 1930s fascist state ruled over by a Richard akin to Oswald Mosley. --Jerry Brotton [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives'
Nine Greek biographies illustrate the rise and fall of Athens, from the legendary days of Theseus, the city's founder, through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades, to the razing of its walls by Lysander. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise of the Roman Empire'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Road to Memphis'
The third novel in a series which started with Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Road to Memphis catches up with the Logan family in 1941. Cassie is entering her last year of high school in Jackson, Mississippi and her older brother Stacey is driving his first car. After a family trip to Memphis, a sequence of events, including pregnancy, death and the intrusions of Pearl Harbor and the second world war wreaks havoc on the family, threatening to separate them from each other, perhaps forever. Drawing upon their strength as a family and the support of their community, the Logans fight for survival, none more than Cassie, who dreams of becoming a lawyer. The Road to Memphis won the 1991 Coretta Scott King Award. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Romeo and Juliet'
Part of "The New Penguin Shakespeare" series, this text looks at "Romeo and Juliet" with an introduction, a list of further reading, commentary and a short account of the textual problems of the play. The series is used and recommended by the Royal Shakespeare Company. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Speak'
Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it's been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud: "My throat is always sore, my lips raw.... Every time I try to talk to my parents or a teacher, I sputter or freeze.... It's like I have some kind of spastic laryngitis." What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors' big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it's because her parents' only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she's been struck mute: Andy Evans. He's a senior at Melinda's high school, and Melinda hasn't been able to speak clearly since he raped her at the senior party last August.
Laurie Halse Anderson's first novel is a stunning and sympathetic tribute to the teenage outcast. The triumphant ending, in which Melinda finds her voice and loudly confronts her rapist, is cause for cheering (while many readers might also shed a tear or two). After reading Speak, it will be hard for any teen to look at the class scapegoat again without a measure of compassion and understanding for that person--who may be screaming beneath the silence. (Ages 13 and older) --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'
First published in 1848, a novel in which a woman flees from a disastrous marriage with her child to a desolate moorland mansion. It portrays one woman's struggle for independence at a time when law and society defined a married woman as her husband's property. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'
In a novel full of poetry and mysterious settings, Hardy unfolds the story of his beautiful, suffering Tess with unforgettable tenderness and intensity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'
This critical edition of Thomas Hardy's 1891 British Victorian novel reprints the authoritative second impression of the 1920 Wessex edition together with five critical essays - newly commissioned or revised - that read Tess of the d'Urbervilles from five contemporary critical perspectives. Each critical essay is accompanied by a succinct introduction to the history, principles, and practice of the critical perspective and by a bibliography that promotes further exploration of that approach. In addition, the text and essays are complemented by an introduction providing biographical and historical contexts for Hardy and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a survey of critical responses to the work since its initial publication, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Three Musketeers: Being the First of the D'artagnan Romances; and Twenty Years After, a Sequel'
D'Artagnan, arriving in Paris from Gascony with no horse and few worldly goods wishes to join the King's Guards. He finds himself in the company of three musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the most renowned fighters of their day. The adventures they share, fighting for the honour of the Queen against the machinations of 'Milady', are rich in drama, colour and romance, which is why "The Three Musketeers" has remained so popular since its first serialisation in 1844. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Toward the African Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Victory'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wayward Bus'
This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Westing Game'
Sixteen heirs of the eccentric multimillionaire Samuel Westing are assembled in the old Westing house, paired off, and given clues to a puzzle they must solve in order to inherit. Reprint. AB. SLJ. H. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What Jamie Saw'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'When She Was Bad'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Fang'
The adventures in the northern wilderness of a dog who is part wolf and who eventually makes his peace with man. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Woman Who Walked Into Doors'
Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Paula recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her feeling powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Los De Abajo'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Noticia De Un Secuestro / News of a Kidnapping'
The Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude probes the 1990 kidnapping of journalists in Colombia by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel. [via]
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