[very nice copy, no discernible wear to book at all; jacket just a bit faded at spine, a few tiny rubbed spots at a couple of corners]. (sepia-tone etchings) Gardner's sixth novel, an unconventional love story set in a small community in the Catskills in the 1950s, about a 42-year-old man who marries a 17-year-old girl who's pregnant with the child of a local boy. View More...
[light foxing to top of text block, slight fading to top edges of boards, no other significant wear; jacket has a few itsy-bitsy closed tears along top and bottom edges, minor surface-scraping surrounding base of spine]. Novel set in Edwardian England, about "an aspiring ingenue who in the summer of 1905 rushes happily into a third-rate repertory troupe that slogs peripatetically through the provinces under the magisterial eye of a thoroughly unreluctant dragoness named Mrs. Bandmann-Palmer (who, incidentally, has played the lead in Hamlet on a record four hundred Saturday nights)." View More...
[moderate wear to cloth at base of spine, very slight surface deterioration to covers, bookplate on front pastedown; jacket shows a bit of wear at edges and extremities, short closed tear at top of front panel, tiny chip at top front hinge and a one-inch tear along top rear hinge, with some associated wrinkling at the top of the spine, slight fading/color shift to title lettering on spine]. Novel set in the organized (and now thankfully illegal) dogfighting racket, "a rugged world of sportsmen, trainers, and dangerously greedy adventurers." The plot concerns a fellow who becomes "an apprenti... View More...
[previous owner's signature at upper corner of front pastedown, otherwise a tight copy with no discernible wear; jacket has just the teensiest bit of wear at a couple of corners]. A woman in her late fifties, finding in difficult circumstances after a lifetime of misfortunes, recalls "her fabulous -- and not so fabulous -- glamorous life with 'the boys,' the big shot racketeers of 1940's Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Jamaica, Cuba and Florida [including' Ben [Bugsy] Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Johnny Reata and others." Errol Flynn pops up as a character, too. View More...
[spine very slightly turned, minor shelfwear to bottom edge, one-time owner's signature at top of ffep; jacket shows just light surface wear, thin black smudge across lower edge of spine]. "Set against the dazzling courts of Madrid and Vienna, the glamorous opera houses of London, Paris, and Rome, [this novel] is the story of Carlo Broschi, detta Farinelli, who actually was the most celebrated musical figure of his time. A male soprano with a bell-like voice which captivated men and women alike, Farinelli began life as a simple Italian peasant. The cruel mutilation which enabled him to ... View More...
[solid copy, light soiling to covers and page edges, black remainder stripe on top edge; jacket shows light surface/edge wear, very minor chipping at spine ends, some creasing to both flaps]. "This first novel introduces a young writer whose imagination offers a unique literary and visceral experience," and purports to be the autobiography of one "Benjamin Hackett -- frightening, fascinating, dangerous, lovable, a twenty-three-year-old living on the edge of madness -- [who] tries to explore the most remote corners of his mind." His instrument is his notebooks, in which he "talks about himsel... View More...
[solid clean copy, a few tiny dents in top and bottom edges of both covers, very light wear to cloth at spine ends; jacket dog-eared along top edge of front panel, light surface wear, a bit of soiling and a small sticker-scar to front panel]. Novelization, more or less, of the duo's screenplay for the film of the same name -- the cross-country odyssey of a man and his cat, beautifully played on screen by Art Carney. The man, not the cat. View More...
[book itself is in beautiful condition, clean and tight with no discernible wear; jacket faded at spine, but otherwise just minimally edgeworn]. Novel about a "sincere if uneducated" itinerant preacher of the hellfire-and-brimstone variety, who attracts converts and repentant sinners in droves -- until he comes under the influence of a woman who persuades him to change his tune and message to that of "joy and loving kidness," which unfortunately causes his business to go right to Hell (so to speak). View More...
[nice tight clean copy, one single page has short diagonal crease at top corner, NO remainder or other marks; jacket shows itsy-bitsy traces of edgewear here and there]. "This is the story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents, Ianto is a sheepshagger -- a yokel, a Welsh redneck. But Ianto is also a seer, a visionary -- the genius loci -- who comprehends nature with a Blakean intensity, and is at one with the world he lives in: the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree. Robbed of his ancestral home --... View More...
(price-clipped) [minor shelfwear to bottom edge of book, one-time owner's name and source annotation on ffep; jacket lightly soiled, a little tanned at spine, with a few small closed tears at top and bottom of front panel]. Comic novel about "an unorthodox poet and professor of poetry" whose self-created Utopia (on a ferryboat moored in San Francisco Bay, with his wife, his five chidren, and "a merry band of nymphs and bearded poet-disciples") is turned upside-down and inside-out when his eight-year-old son Erasmus (who plays the French horn and is utterly devoted to Brigitte B... View More...
[good solid copy, bottom corners lightly bumped; jacket a tiny bit dog-eared at top of spine]. Novel set against the background of a Quaker community, examining the life of Mildred Moore through the narrative device of remembrances at her funeral service. "What was the meaning of Mildred Moore's work in France during the First World War, in Russia during the famine of the twenties, in Depression-torn mining villages of Wales? Had she loved herself more than God's people? Was her goodness preferable to another's evil? Such questions bedevil the minds of those come to mourn. With love, ... View More...
[minimal shelfwear, spine very slightly turned; jacket shows just a bit of wear at edges and extremities]. Kind of an British "Blackboard Jungle"/"Up the Down Staircase," with an idealistic teacher trying to cope with students in a "special school" who are "uniformly disturbed, ranging from the violently psychotic to the pathetic simpleton." The author, a native of Kansas, had had relevant teaching experience in both San Francisco (including as part of "a team of social workers dealing with juvenile delinquent Negro boys") and London, where she lived a... View More...
[nice tight clean copy, very light wear at extremities; jacket shows just a trace of wear at a few corners]. Novel about a "half-breed" boy, Jamie, who "lives in an average American suburb, loves his mother, idolizes his father, and is appealing and normal in every way. Except that he refuses to talk," except to an invisible companion, Mr. Bow, who is "not quite a mystic, but has qualities of a sachem or guru." The authors, per the jacket blurb, were personally acquainted with "a number of medicine men of various American Indian tribes [and had] lived with the Ch... View More...
(price-clipped) [very light foxing to top edge, otherwise a nice fresh copy with no significant wear; jacket has one tiny chip at top of front panel, also torn with a bit of paper loss at top rear hinge and bottom front hinge, one additional small closed tear at top of rear panel, minor edgewear elsewhere]. Early novel by Burgess, the first of two published under this pseudonym. Satirical novel about a young married couple, "the husband having a sort of brain good an winning quizzes, so he wins The Big Money on a TV quiz and then puts the money on horses and he becomes a rich man. And so... View More...
(price-clipped) [nice tight clean book, with no discernible wear; jacket shows a tiny bit of surface wear to the rear panel, short diagonal crease at bottom of front flap]. Novel set in London and Glasgow, about "the old triangle -- two women and a man -- a husband, a wife, a little girl from the office. If the basic situation is more than familiar, it still has never been explored with such power or described and dissected so vividly in contemporary terms." This was the first of two posthumously-published novels by Kennaway, a Scottish novelist who died in a car accident in 1968 at ... View More...
[very light spotting on top edge of text block, no other significant wear; jacket shows just a little wear along top and bottom edges, short diagonal crease at top of rear flap]. "Sixteen-year-old Billy comes to terms with his own values when he is sent to live with his gay uncle in Tucson and is introduced to the world of rodeos where he falls in love with an outspoken racehorse rider named Cara." View More...
[nice tight clean copy, with no discernible wear; jacket shows only the faintest handling wear]. Leavitt's novel of a homosexual love affair, set against the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, and in particular the Spanish Civil War. The author borrowed a bit too liberally from poet Stephen Spender's 1951 memoir "World Within World"; Spender filed a plagiarism suit in England, which ultimately led to the preparation of issuance of a revised version. It's often stated that the original version was "suppressed," which is a considerable exaggeration. In fact, Viking recall... View More...
[solid clean copy, very light shelfwear; jacket a tiny bit scuffed]. The author's breakthrough novel, at least in a culture where "breakthrough" = "somebody makes a big successful movie out of it," as Clint Eastwood did with this one. View More...
[nice clean copy, the slightest hint of shelfwear to bottom edge; jacket is flawless]. SIGNED boldly by the author on the title page. The author's second novel, "The Wizard of Oz remade as road noir," in which a character named Chaos sets off down the road in an (apparently) post-apocalyptic Wyoming, in "pursuit of a missing identity and a stolen love." View More...
[nice tight copy, very minor soiling to page edges, NO remainder mark; jacket rubbed/scuffed, some surface-scratching]. The Minneapolis-based columnist/humorist's elusive first novel, about the " society" editor of a small-town Minnesota newspaper, whose wish for a simple life goes wildly awry, first when he inherits his great-aunt's house -- "the Minneapolis version of Mad King Ludwig's castle," complete with ancient servants and a freeloading cousin -- and then when he gets involved as the unwilling "media mouthpiece" for AIL, the Alimentary Instruction League, "... View More...