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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alexander's Bridge'
In this, Willa Cather's first novel, we find Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn bewteen his duties to his career and his wife, and his passion for an Irish actress. In the only critical edition available, we see how Cather uses urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn of the century. Both anxious and celebratory, Cather's novel anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of that emergence. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death Comes for the Archbishop'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Early Novels and Stories'
"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her powerful fiction the Nebraska frontier of her youth. The vast Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow and the sky is huge and open, mirrors the uniquely American ethic of her characters: their heroic aspirations and stoicism, their passion for creativity, their rebelliousness of spirit. This volume, the first in The Library of America's authoritative three-volume collected Cather, includes the story collection "The Troll Garden," her first work of fiction, along with the beloved novels "O Pioneers!," "The Song of the Lark," "My Antonia," and "One of Ours," which earned a Pulitzer Prize. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Imagining Characters: Conversations About Women Writers Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison'
In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Lost Lady'
› 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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Antonia'
Willa Cather's My ÃÂntonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows ÃÂntonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture.
The Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary source materials: the revised introduction for the 1926 edition; Cather's "Mesa Verde Wonderland is Easy to Reach...," "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle," "Peter", and her comments on the novel; contemporary reviews and photographs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'O Pioneers!'
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." . . .
"The land belongs to the future . . . that's the way it seems to me. . . . I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while." -- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Willa Cather -- born in Back Creek, Virginia, in 1873 -- was nine when she and her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska. She grew up on the plains -- and the plains grew into her as she did. This 1913 novel -- the story of an immigrant family's struggle to save their Nebraska farm -- grew out of her, and, of course, through her: there's a reason that this -- Cather's second novel -- is the famous book it has become. Cather attended the University of Nebraska, and worked six years on the editorial staff at McClure's Magazine in New York City; she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'O Pioneers! and Other Tales of the Praire'
The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes, curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer trunk.
"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may send for it, and I may not. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Old Beauty, and Others'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor's House'
Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a "nouvelle into the roman," hence the first-person "Tom Outland's Story" wedged between the other two parts of the novel. Second, she compared the novel's structure to a sonata form in music, with the center section in significant contrast to the surrounding sections
Behind the understated prose relating the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who, despite his success, experiences at midcareer a profound disappointment with life, is the fierce account of how he decides to continue living despite those disappointments. Tom Outland's thrilling tale of a long-lost civilization is both an ironic contrast to the professor's staid outer life and a mirror of the imaginative interior life he experiences in his attic study.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Readings on My Antonia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Song of the Lark'
[This is the MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case.]
In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist in the making, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self.
Thea Kronborg, a minister's daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her humble hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the big city, determined to be an opera diva. As she moves through a series of music teachers in Chicago, Thea finds that the attitudes and standards of those around her rarely match her own. It is only when she reconnects with pure nature in a brilliant Arizona desert canyon that Thea rediscovers the sensuous, mystical openness that is the source of her art. Realizing she must protect this experience at all costs, she resolves to shed all relationships that don't serve her higher purpose. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Surprised by C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald and Dante: An Array of Original Discoveries'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Transforming Vision: Writers on Art'
In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous writers, including John Updike, Wallace Stevens, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Levine, contribute poems and prose--most never before published--on artworks found in one of the country's preeminent museums. 70 illustrations, 63 in color. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Willa Cather'
Featuring her wonderfully readable and often anthologized short stories, the third and final volume (with "Early Novels and Stories" and "Later Novels") of the most comprehensive Cather edition available anywhere. Includes the short-story collections "Youth and the Bright Medusa," "Obscure Destinies," and "The Old Beauty and Others," the novellas "Alexander's Bridge" and "My Mortal Enemy," occasional pieces, critical essays, and Cather's only book of poetry. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Willa Cather'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Willa Cather Later Novels'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing As an Art'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Vers Lui-Meme: Probleme De La Langue Du Vers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mi Antonia / My Antonia'
Mi Antonia / My Antonia (Clasicos / Classics) (Spanish Edition) [via]
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