The Room
Selby Jr., Hubert A Fine tight copy in a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with light toning to the edges. The Room, by the author of The Last Exit to Brooklyn, is a startling series of recollections and fantasies that illuminate the workings of a prisoner's unhinged mind. He yearns for his violent childhood, rages against obscure authorities, and imagines enacting horrible revenge on those who imprisoned him. The prisoner's remand cell becomes the scene of a surreal mental torture. Disorienting, nightmarish and structurally inventive, "The Room" is a shocking examination of the suffering humans can inflict on each other.- $125
- $125
The Sound of the Mountain: A Novel.
[Japanese Literature] Kawabata, Yasunari. A NVery Good copy in a Very Good unclipped dust jacket with two closed edge tears and chipping to the spine. Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain is a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age and the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing. By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time.- $50
- $50
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories.
Kawabata, Yasunari. A Fine copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. The three stories presented in this volume all center upon a lonely protagonist and his peculiar eroticism. In each, the author explores the interplay of fantasy and reality at work on a mind in solitude-in "House of the Sleeping Beauties," the elderly Eguchi and his clandestine trips to his club; in "One Arm," the bizarre dialogue of a man with the arm of a young girl; in "Of Birds and Beasts," a middle-aged man's memories of an affair with a dancer mingled with glimpses of his abnormal attachment to his pets. All of these stories appear in English for the first time outside of Japan.- $75
- $75
Runaway Horses.
[Japanese Literature] Mishima, Yukio. A Very Good plus copy in a Very Good unclipped dust jacket with two closed edge tears to the heel of the spine. In 1932, Shigeuki Honda has become a judge in Osaka. Convinced that a young rightist revolutionary, Isao, is the reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, Honda commits himself to saving the youth from an untimely death. Isao, driven to patriotic fanaticism by a father who instilled in him the ethos of the ancient samurai, organizes a violent plot against the new industrialists who he believes are usurping the Emperors rightful power and threatening the very integrity of the nation. Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a conspiracy a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war.- $50
- $50
Beauty and Sadness: A Novel.
[Japanese Literature] Kawabata, Yasunari. A Near Fine copy in a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket. The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before. Otoko is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continues to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.- $65
- $65
The Morning Watch.
Agee, James. A Near Fine copy in a Very Good plus unclipped dust jacket with light wear to the extremities.The Morning Watch by James Agee, like his A Death in the Family, which won him the Pulitzer Prize, is autobiographical. It describes the experiences of twelve-year-old Richard during the early hours of Good Friday and the early stages of spring, in a church school in the Tennessee mountains. In this story of change and visitations, Agee has come close to a small triumph: he has pierced the protective shell of a boys personality and exposed his religious exaltation without once falling into bathos. During his watch in the chapel, Richards deepest thoughts and feelings are disturbed by weak flesh and childish imaginings. In tone, image, movement, and occasional obscure symbolism, this short novel has something of the quality of a dark poem, plumbing the inextricability of good, evil, beauty, preposterousness, the simple, and the unfathomable, in more or less ordinary sensations and motives.- $125
- $125
The Rain in Portugal: Poems.
[Poetry] Collins, Billy. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. The Rain in Portugal sheds Collinss ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.- $45
- $45
The Lake.
Kawabata, Yasunari. A Fine copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the streetand hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream-the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is "an angel's," the figures of two students he follows seem to "glide over the green grass that hid their knees." In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a "happening," making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata's works. Just as the hero's interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry.- $95
- $95
Hemingway: A Biography.
[Hemingway] Meyers, Jeffrey. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. This evocative, sympathetic biography illuminates the events that informed Hemingway's vigorous life: an accident-prone youth and early rivalry with his father; his experiences in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II; his stormy relationships with writers and women; his sudden fame, slow decline, and suicide. Based on previously unavailable information and exclusive interviews, Hemingway enriches anyone's understanding and appreciation of America's most important twentieth-century writer.- $65
- $65
Ballistics: Poems.
Collins, Billy. A Fine unread copy in a Fine dust jacket. In this playful collection, Billy Collins touches on an array of subjectslove, death, solitude, youth, and agingdelving deeper than ever before into the intricate folds of life. Collins is never carefree, but he is, as always, accessible and high-spirited, making light even when telling himself that nothing lasts- $45
- $45
If Not, Winter. Fragments of Sappho.
[Poetry] Carson, Anne. A Fine copy in a Fine price-clipped dust jacket. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sapphos fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electricor, to use Sapphos words, as "thin fire . racing under skin."- $125
- $125
The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition.
Lewis, C. S. AS Near Fine copy in a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket. Lewis traces the development of the idea of courtly love from the Provençal troubadours to its full development in the works of Chrétien de Troyes. It is here that he sets forth a famous characterization of "the peculiar form which it [courtly love] first took; the four marks of Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love"the last two of which "marks" have, in particular, been the subject of a good deal of controversy among later scholars. Lewis goes on to examine the use of allegory and personification in the depiction of love in a selection of poetic works, beginning with the Roman de la Rose. The focus, however, is on English works: the poems of Chaucer, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Usk's Testament of Love, the works of Chaucer's epigones, and Spenser's Faerie Queene.- $125
- $125
Whale Day and Other Poems.
[Poetry] Collins, Billy. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our countrys most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral.- $45
- $45
Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems.
[Poetry] Collins, Billy. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this smart, lyrical, and mischievous collection of poetry, which covers the everlasting themes of love and loss, youth and aging, solitude and union, Collins s verbal gifts are on full display.- $65
- $65
The Decay of the Angel.
[Japanese Literature] Mishima, Yukio. A Very Good plus copy in Very Good unclipped dust jacket with a closed tear to the front panel and wear to the top of the spine. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, once more encounters a person he believes to be a reincarnation of his friend, Kiyoaki Matsugaethis time restored to life as a teenage orphan, Toru. Adopting the boy as his heir, Honda quickly finds that Toru is a force to be reckoned with. The final novel of this celebrated tetralogy weaves together the dominant themes of the previous three novels in the series: the decay of Japans courtly tradition; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishimas apocalyptic vision of the modern era.- $50
- $50
Nine Horses: Poems.
Collins, Billy. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. In Nine Horses, Collins continues his delicate negotiation between the clear and the mysterious, the comic and the elegiac. The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hidden textures are revealed by Collinss poetic eye. With clarity, precision, and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination.- $45
- $45
Walker Evans: A Biography.
[Photographer] Rathbone, Belinda. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. Walker Evan's photographs are American classics. His legendary images of southern sharecroppers in LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN and his pictures documenting the Depression era make up a haunting protrayal of the American soul. This first full biography on Evans penetrates the anonymity of his legendary photographs to reveal the artist who profoundly influenced the generation of photographers who followed him. The book also traces the artstically fecund times that nurtured him.- $65
- $65
In the Lateness of the World: Poems.
[Poetry] Forche, Carolyn. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.- $45
- $45
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt.
[Poetry] Clampitt, Amy. A Near Fine tight copy in a Near Fine bright unclipped dust jacket with small moisture stain to foredge not affecting the text. Collected here for the first time are Amy Clampitt's five books of poetry published before her death in 1994. These works represent some of the best poetry written in late- 20th-century America and speak to her major themes of place and displacement. They also address her deep feelings for landscapes whether it be the prairies of Iowa, the coast of Maine, the Scottish Isles, the Italian countryside or the streets of New York City. A personal and affecting introduction by poet Mary Jo Salter rounds out the volume.- $50
- $50
Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000.
[Drug Culture] Torgorr, Martin. A Fine tight copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. illegal drugs have profoundly shaped America's cultural landscape, from the narcotic allure of the bebop and Beat generations to the psychedelic 1960s, Vietnam, the cocaine-fueled disco era, the crack epidemic, and the ecstasy-induced rave culture. Weaving together first-person accounts and historical background, Torgoff tells the stories of those whose lives became synonymous with the drug culture, from Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John Belushi to ordinary people who felt their consciousness "expanded" or who plumbed the depths of addiction. This is a vivid work of cultural history that neither demonizes nor romanticizes its subject,- $75
- $75
A Temple of Texts. Essays.
[Essays] Gass, William. A Fine copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. In this volume, Gass pays homage to the readerly side of the literary experience by turning his critical sensibility upon all the books that shaped his own development as a reader, writer, and human being. With essays on figures ranging from William Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein to Flann O'Brien and Robert Burton, Gass creates a "temple" of readerly devotion, a collection of critical explorations as brilliant and incisive as readers have come to expect from this literary master, but also a surprisingly personal window into the author's own literary development.- $95
- $95